Burning Man Project sells an extraordinary idea. For one week every year, tens of thousands of people travel into Nevada’s Black Rock Desert and construct a temporary city that is supposed to operate according to a culture radically different from the one they left behind. Money largely disappears from the visible experience. People give instead of sell. They participate instead of consume. They build community, create art, endure an unforgiving environment together and are encouraged to rely upon themselves rather than the conveniences and services that define ordinary life.

Burning Man formally expresses that culture through its Ten Principles: Radical Inclusion, Gifting, Decommodification, Radical Self-reliance, Radical Self-expression, Communal Effort, Civic Responsibility, Leaving No Trace, Participation and Immediacy. They are admirable ideas, and I understand why they have attracted generations of people to the Black Rock Desert. My problem is that after spending several years around Burning Man from an unusual vantage point, I found that those ideals could bear remarkably little resemblance to what I actually witnessed.

I did not come to Burning Man as a journalist looking for a story. I wasn’t a lifelong Burner, and I didn’t arrive determined to criticize the culture. My introduction to Burning Man came through my work transporting recreational vehicles. That work eventually gave me an unusual view of the event because I saw it from the highway, from behind the wheel, from inside upscale camps and eventually from the vendor side of the enormous logistical operation required to make Black Rock City possible. The closer I got to Burning Man, the harder it became for me to reconcile what the event says about itself with what I saw happening around me.

My first exposure came when I was contacted by a very eccentric physician from Miami who had extremely particular requirements concerning the transportation of his recreational vehicle. He was renting an RV from Cruise America, and the arrangement was made in my name so I could be properly covered as a driver. He paid me approximately $2,000 to transport it between the Los Angeles area and Reno and back. I didn’t actually make it inside Burning Man that first year, but I had been introduced to the enormous logistical ecosystem surrounding the event, and that alone fascinated me.

The following year, I became considerably more involved. Instead of having the physician rent another RV from Cruise America, I rented him one of my own units for approximately what he otherwise would have paid commercially. From there, my involvement expanded. I rented additional units and transported others, and eventually I was involved in moving approximately 14 recreational vehicles between Southern California and Black Rock City. At that point, I wasn’t simply hearing stories about Burning Man. I was helping transport the infrastructure that made a certain version of Burning Man possible.

That was when one of the event’s most celebrated principles began sounding very different to me: Radical Self-reliance. Burning Man describes the principle as encouraging people to discover, exercise and rely upon their own inner resources. There is something inherently strange about hearing that language after being paid thousands of dollars to transport someone’s recreational vehicle hundreds of miles so that an air-conditioned home on wheels can be waiting for them near the playa. The contradiction becomes even more pronounced when you understand how much additional infrastructure can surround that RV.

Someone rents the vehicle. Someone transports it. Someone provisions it. Someone arranges the fuel. Someone handles maintenance. Someone deals with sanitation. Someone provides food. Someone builds the camp. Someone can even provide security. Then the participant arrives in Black Rock City and participates in an event celebrating Radical Self-reliance. I am certainly not criticizing RVs themselves. I own them, rent them and transport them. I have made money doing precisely that. My criticism is directed at the mythology surrounding an experience that, for some people, has become remarkably dependent upon paid services.

If Burning Man simply described itself as an enormous desert arts festival where people build incredible things, listen to music, experiment, party and enjoy themselves, I would have considerably less to criticize. There is nothing inherently wrong with any of that. But Burning Man attaches something much larger to the experience. It presents a philosophy built around Decommodification, Participation, Communal Effort and Radical Self-reliance. Once I began seeing how the wealthier end of Burning Man actually operated, those words became increasingly difficult for me to reconcile with reality.

One of the experiences that fundamentally changed my perception occurred when I rolled into the event with a group of Danish models who needed transportation. Through that experience, I gained access to an extremely upscale camp, and what I encountered wasn’t people roughing it in the desert. It was decadence. There were luxury RVs, elaborate accommodations, sophisticated dining arrangements and expensive infrastructure designed to insulate participants from many of the very hardships supposedly central to the Burning Man experience. I encountered private security and saw an environment that, in some respects, felt considerably closer to luxury hospitality than an experiment in Radical Self-reliance.

The cost of participating at that level can become extraordinary. Once you begin combining tickets, transportation, recreational vehicles, camp dues, supplies, food, equipment and logistics, spending well into five figures is hardly unimaginable. There is nothing inherently immoral about wealthy people enjoying themselves, and I have no objection to somebody spending their own money on an extravagant vacation. If you want an air-conditioned RV, excellent food and a comfortable bed in the middle of the Nevada desert, that’s your decision. But at some point, we should be willing to acknowledge that purchasing your way around nearly every uncomfortable element of the experience sits awkwardly beside a philosophy centered on Radical Self-reliance.

The difference between participants also became impossible for me to ignore. There are people sleeping in tents, building their own camps, preparing their own food and spending months creating art they will give to the community. There are volunteers working incredibly hard to make Black Rock City function. Those people unquestionably exist, and I don’t want my criticism to diminish their contributions. But there are also people with enough money to outsource enormous portions of their experience. Those two people may technically be attending the same Burning Man, but economically and practically, they aren’t necessarily experiencing the same event.

Burning Man itself has recognized this tension for years. The organization has wrestled publicly with what it has called “plug-and-play” or turnkey camps and the concept of “PAYticipation,” where people effectively purchase an experience rather than meaningfully helping create it. Burning Man has acknowledged that this can undermine Participation, Communal Effort, Decommodification and Radical Self-reliance. That acknowledgment is significant because it means the contradiction isn’t simply something critics have invented. The organization itself knows that money can create class divisions inside a supposedly communal experiment.

Eventually, I decided that if I was going to continue working around Burning Man, I wanted to operate within its official system. I applied to become an approved Outside Services provider, commonly referred to as OSS, and was accepted as an RV-related vendor. The Outside Services Program exists to regulate approved companies providing certain services and infrastructure connected to Black Rock City. Becoming part of that system gave me another perspective on Burning Man, and in some ways it was even more revealing than seeing the luxury camps.

The rules and regulations were voluminous. There were requirements for seemingly everything, and some of that is completely understandable. Black Rock City is effectively a temporary municipality constructed in an extremely difficult environment on federal land. Tens of thousands of people, vehicles, generators, sanitation systems, camps and massive art installations cannot simply appear in the desert without substantial planning and regulation. Public safety matters. Environmental protection matters. Transportation matters. I don’t object to Burning Man having rules. What frustrated me was experiencing an organization capable of generating enormous amounts of bureaucracy that sometimes seemed remarkably incapable of making straightforward decisions.

At one point, I was contacted about potentially housing an operations team associated with the event. This was not a minor proposal. We were discussing approximately 20 trailers positioned close to the event for roughly two months. For my company, that represented a substantial potential commitment. Equipment needed to be reserved, transportation needed to be planned, drivers and personnel needed to be considered, and other business opportunities might have to be declined because those units would potentially be committed to Burning Man.

Negotiations progressed, and we became very close to an agreement. Eventually, however, I needed an answer. A decision was supposed to be made by a particular date. That date arrived and was extended. Another deadline approached, and that was extended as well. This happened repeatedly until my point of contact essentially conveyed the underlying problem to me: nobody seemed capable of making the final decision. For a business trying to plan equipment and personnel, that level of uncertainty is incredibly difficult to manage.

That experience came to symbolize Burning Man for me. I encountered an organization with enormous volumes of procedures explaining precisely what vendors were expected to do, yet obtaining a straightforward organizational decision could become extraordinarily difficult. The irony was difficult to miss. An event that celebrates Immediacy had developed layers of bureaucracy. An event celebrating Radical Self-reliance depended upon an enormous network of outside infrastructure. An event celebrating Decommodification had developed a formal system for managing the commercial providers required to support it.

Decommodification became perhaps the strangest contradiction of all. Burning Man says it seeks to create an environment free from commercial sponsorships, transactions and advertising and wants to resist replacing participation with consumption. Again, I admire the concept. But follow one recreational vehicle from Los Angeles to Black Rock City and tell me that commerce has disappeared. Someone bought it. Someone rented it. Someone insured it. Someone transported it. Someone filled it with fuel. Someone provisioned it. Someone maintained it. Someone cleaned it. Someone transported it home. Money changed hands repeatedly before and after that RV ever reached the playa.

Multiply that by thousands of participants, vehicles, generators, trailers, equipment, flights, hotels, storage facilities, food suppliers, drivers, transportation companies and professional services, and the economic footprint becomes enormous. Burning Man hasn’t eliminated commerce. In many respects, it has simply pushed commerce beyond the visible boundaries of Black Rock City. The credit card gets used before you reach the gate. I know that because people like me were on the other side of those transactions.

I participated in that economy, and I profited from it. I am not embarrassed to acknowledge that because providing transportation is legitimate work. What I find increasingly ridiculous is pretending that the economic machinery somehow doesn’t count because the transaction occurred in Los Angeles, Reno or somewhere along Interstate 80 rather than underneath the Man. The entire peripheral economy exists precisely because Burning Man exists. Decommodification hasn’t eliminated the market surrounding Burning Man. Burning Man has helped create that market.

Then I read what John Law had to say.

Law isn’t someone criticizing Burning Man because he doesn’t understand it. He is one of the people who helped create it and was instrumental in bringing the gathering to Nevada’s Black Rock Desert in 1990. In a recent essay subsequently covered by Yahoo, Law argued that Burning Man has “lost its anarchist soul,” contrasting the modern event with the radically different gathering he remembers from its earliest years.

That caught my attention because Law’s perspective and mine couldn’t be more different. He saw Burning Man near the beginning. I entered its world decades later through the commercial and logistical machinery surrounding it. Yet we appear to have arrived at remarkably similar concerns. Law remembers a gathering where people largely created the experience themselves. I transported accommodations so people wouldn’t have to. He remembers something anarchistic and improvisational. I encountered vendor programs, elaborate infrastructure, expensive camps, professional services and layers of organizational bureaucracy.

Law has also criticized the transformation of Burning Man into something increasingly oriented toward wealthy elites and the creative professionals who service them. Reporting on his comments describes his criticism of luxury camps, private chefs and wealthy attendees arriving by private aircraft. That description immediately resonated with me because I had witnessed my own version of precisely that world. I wasn’t reading an abstract criticism of something I had never seen. I had transported part of the infrastructure supporting it.

There is also an important historical detail that complicates Burning Man’s mythology. The famous Ten Principles weren’t written at the beginning of Burning Man. Larry Harvey formally articulated them in 2004 as Burning Man expanded its regional culture. That doesn’t make the principles meaningless, but it does illustrate how Burning Man evolved from an improvised gathering into an institution that eventually needed to formally explain what its culture was supposed to represent.

Perhaps that evolution explains some of what I witnessed. The larger and more institutionalized Burning Man became, the more necessary it became to articulate Radical Self-reliance while simultaneously building systems for outside service providers. It celebrated Decommodification while an enormous commercial ecosystem developed around it. It emphasized Participation while wealthy attendees increasingly possessed the ability to purchase services that removed much of the work from participating. The principles remained constant on paper while the economic and organizational reality surrounding them changed dramatically.

One detail from Law’s description of the early years captures the transformation particularly well. The first Black Rock Desert gathering in 1990 involved only around 80 people, some of whom slept directly on the desert floor in sleeping bags. Compare that with the Burning Man I encountered decades later, where I was transporting recreational vehicles hundreds of miles so participants could arrive with beds, refrigerators, bathrooms, generators and air conditioning. From sleeping bags to luxury RVs is almost a perfect metaphor for what happened to Burning Man.

Again, I don’t believe every Burner is a hypocrite, and I don’t believe everything about Burning Man is fraudulent. That would be unfair. There are artists who devote enormous amounts of time and money to creating extraordinary things simply because they want other people to experience them. There are volunteers, builders and ordinary participants who genuinely embody the principles Burning Man promotes. There are people who save money all year to attend and people for whom the experience has produced friendships and memories that genuinely changed their lives. I have no interest in dismissing those experiences.

My criticism is directed at the widening gulf between Burning Man as an idea and Burning Man as an institution. Something can be genuine while simultaneously becoming hypocritical. The art can be extraordinary while the economics become absurd. The community can be meaningful while wealth creates obvious class distinctions. Participants can genuinely practice Radical Self-reliance while other participants effectively purchase their way around it. All of those things can be true simultaneously.

The wealth question is particularly difficult for Burning Man to escape because wealth changes the nature of almost any environment. A billionaire and a schoolteacher can stand beside each other watching the Man burn, but their ability to navigate the week can be radically different. One participant may be assembling a tent in the dust, rationing supplies and cooking meals over a small stove while another returns to an elaborate air-conditioned camp with professional food service and hired assistance. They occupy the same geographic space, but it becomes increasingly difficult to argue that socioeconomic status has somehow disappeared.

The desert doesn’t erase class. It doesn’t erase money. It doesn’t erase privilege. It simply creates an unusual environment in which people can temporarily pretend those distinctions have become less important. But when enough money allows someone to outsource the very difficulties supposedly responsible for making Burning Man transformative, wealth fundamentally changes the experience.

Maybe I would feel differently if I had experienced Burning Man only as a participant. Perhaps my strongest memories would be the art, music, sunrise, friendships and conversations with strangers. But that wasn’t my Burning Man. My Burning Man involved logistics, transportation, contracts, insurance, recreational vehicles, trailers, drivers, vendor approvals, rules, deadlines, negotiations and customers willing to spend substantial amounts of money to make their supposedly radically self-reliant experience considerably more comfortable.

I saw the machinery behind the mythology, and once you see the machinery, it becomes difficult to pretend it isn’t there. There is an almost perfect irony in the fact that I entered Burning Man through RV transportation because I didn’t simply observe the contradiction. I helped deliver it. I transported the air conditioning, beds, refrigerators, bathrooms and shelter. I helped bring the comforts of conventional American life into the middle of a desert where people were supposedly traveling to escape conventional American life. I made money doing it, the participants received what they wanted and the system worked exactly as designed. Somewhere in the middle of all of that, everyone continued talking about Radical Self-reliance and Decommodification.

That ultimately leaves me with a very simple question: what exactly are we proving? Why travel hundreds or thousands of miles into a brutally hot desert only to spend enormous amounts of money recreating the comforts you supposedly went there to escape? Why transport an air-conditioned apartment into Black Rock City to experience Radical Self-reliance? Why pay other people to build, transport, provision and maintain your experience while celebrating Participation? Why construct luxury camps while preaching Decommodification? Why build an increasingly complicated institutional bureaucracy around something supposedly devoted to Immediacy?

If you want to party, party. If you want extravagant food, eat extravagant food. If you want to spend five figures on a weeklong vacation, spend it. If you’re a millionaire or billionaire and want to create an extraordinary desert playground for yourself and your friends, that’s your prerogative. I don’t object to any of those things individually. What bothers me is conspicuous consumption dressed in the language of anti-consumerism and dependence on an enormous service economy dressed in the language of Radical Self-reliance.

Burning Man nevertheless remains an extraordinary logistical accomplishment. Building a temporary city in the Black Rock Desert is remarkable. Some of the art is breathtaking, some of the engineering is astonishing, and the amount of human labor necessary to construct Black Rock City and then dismantle it is difficult to comprehend. I met fascinating people because of Burning Man, made money because of Burning Man and experienced situations I probably never would have encountered anywhere else. I don’t regret those experiences, and I don’t need to pretend that everything about the event is terrible in order to criticize what I believe it has become.

John Law hasn’t attended Burning Man since 1996, and there is something almost poetic about that. He remembers an event that bears increasingly little resemblance to the institution that exists today. He remembers an anarchistic collaboration of people building something strange in the desert because they wanted to, without the sprawling infrastructure, luxury accommodations, professional services and bureaucracy that surround the modern event. I encountered the descendant of that experiment from an entirely different perspective. I dealt with the vendors, logistics, transportation, RVs, regulations and money. I saw luxury camps firsthand, and I watched people spend extraordinary amounts of money insulating themselves from many of the hardships that Radical Self-reliance supposedly asks participants to embrace.

Burning Man may still be an extraordinary party, and I have no doubt that it continues to produce extraordinary art, remarkable friendships and experiences that genuinely change people’s lives. What I cannot overlook anymore is the enormous gulf between the values Burning Man publicly celebrates and the reality I personally witnessed. Radical Self-reliance becomes a strange phrase when somebody else transports your luxury accommodations to the desert. Decommodification becomes increasingly difficult to defend when an enormous commercial economy exists to support the experience. Communal Effort means something very different when wealth allows one participant to outsource the difficult parts while another spends days building everything themselves.

Perhaps the greatest irony of modern Burning Man is that you can supposedly escape capitalism for a week in the Nevada desert, but you may have to spend an extraordinary amount of money getting there, staying there and protecting yourself from the very environment you traveled thousands of miles to experience. The money hasn’t disappeared. The commerce hasn’t disappeared. The class differences haven’t disappeared. In many cases, they have simply been moved outside the gates or disguised beneath the language of participation, gifting and community. The desert does not magically erase wealth, privilege or consumerism simply because there aren’t corporate logos hanging everywhere.

That is ultimately why my perspective on Burning Man changed so dramatically. I wasn’t standing outside Black Rock City criticizing something I had never experienced. I participated in the system that made the modern experience possible. I rented the RVs, transported them, worked through the vendor process, dealt with the bureaucracy and saw the upscale camps. I benefited financially from that system, and I am perfectly willing to acknowledge my own role in it. In fact, that is precisely why I believe my perspective matters. I didn’t simply witness the contradiction. I helped deliver it.

John Law remembers what Burning Man was. I saw, from a very different vantage point, what it has become. Maybe Burning Man can eventually rediscover some of the culture that made it revolutionary in the first place, or perhaps it has simply grown too large, too expensive and too institutionalized ever to return to that version of itself. Either way, I have seen enough to make my own decision. I helped deliver Burning Man’s luxury, I saw what existed behind the mythology, and I watched its principles collide with the reality on the ground. For me, the contradiction eventually became impossible to ignore, and I have no desire to participate in it anymore. I will not be back.

Roger Rogoff has spent more than three decades inside the American justice system, but there is no single title that fully explains his career. He has been a county prosecutor, an Assistant United States Attorney, a criminal defense attorney, a King County Superior Court judge, corporate counsel, the director of Washington State’s Office of Independent Investigations and, today, a trial lawyer once again. He has prosecuted serious criminal cases, presided over courtrooms, evaluated witnesses, worked around confidential sources and cooperating defendants, taught trial advocacy and helped build an investigative agency designed to examine the conduct of law enforcement itself.

What interested me most, however, was not simply the breadth of the résumé. Plenty of accomplished lawyers have long résumés. What interested me was what happens to someone’s understanding of people after occupying so many different positions inside the same justice system. A prosecutor looks at a case differently than a defense attorney. A judge sees things neither side necessarily sees. An investigative leader encounters an entirely different problem when the credibility of the institution itself becomes part of the investigation. Rogoff has lived inside all of those perspectives, and throughout our conversation he kept returning to the same idea: if you want to understand what is actually happening, you have to listen.

That sounds elementary until Rogoff explains what he means. “I think the biggest mistake people make is in any situation when they are working criminal cases is listening to respond instead of listening to understand,” he told me. That sentence became the organizing principle of our conversation because it reaches far beyond trial advocacy. It applies to the investigator interviewing a witness, the prosecutor sitting across from a cooperating defendant, the judge listening to two sharply different versions of the same event and the attorney trying to determine whether a potential client is telling the truth. It applies equally to intelligence work, where the person supplying the information may have complicated motivations and where misunderstanding one sentence can alter the trajectory of an investigation.

Rogoff’s distinction is simple but important. Listening to respond means you are waiting for the opening that allows you to defend what you already believe. Listening to understand means you are permitting the other person to potentially change your understanding. The first approach is adversarial by nature. The second is investigative.

For The Human Intelligence Ledger, that distinction matters enormously. Human intelligence is fundamentally about understanding people who possess information that cannot always be obtained through technological means. Surveillance may show where someone went. Financial records may establish that money moved. A telephone may establish that two people communicated. A wiretap may capture what they said. But understanding why a meeting occurred, who actually controls an organization, what coded language means, why money was transferred or what a particular relationship represents often requires someone who understands the human context.

Rogoff knows that environment from experience. When I asked him how important human sources and cooperating witnesses had been during his years as a federal prosecutor, he answered immediately.

“I mean, it’s everything.”

He had prosecuted federal cases involving violent crime, firearms, gangs and other serious offenses, and he had also worked drug trafficking investigations and wiretap cases. Those kinds of investigations routinely involve information coming from people who exist somewhere inside the criminal ecosystem being investigated.

“Having someone who can talk about what is actually happening and connect you to evidence that you can use and sort of making all of this real and understandable is everything to a case,” Rogoff said. He continued by making an observation that experienced investigators will recognize instantly. “There’s not a case that happens that doesn’t at least start with some human source saying, ‘Hey, this happened,’ or someone getting arrested for something very minor and saying, ‘Hey, I know something more.’”

That “something more” is often where an ordinary investigation becomes consequential. A seemingly peripheral person may know who directs an organization. Someone arrested on a relatively minor charge may understand a supply chain stretching across several states. A cooperating defendant may explain the significance of conversations investigators have already intercepted but do not fully understand. A witness may reveal that the person publicly associated with a criminal enterprise is not actually the person exercising authority.

Human intelligence creates context. Rogoff’s understanding of that process did not begin with federal law enforcement. It began much earlier, in a household where he watched his father work with people facing some of the most frightening moments imaginable.

Rogoff described growing up in a privileged environment. His father was a radiation oncologist, which meant he spent his professional life around people with cancer, including people confronting the possibility of death. Yet the stories his father brought home were rarely centered on the technical details of medicine. “The thing that struck me about my dad was that all of his stories were not about medicine and disease, but about people,” Rogoff said. “He was incredibly interested in all of his patients.”

His father protected their identities, of course, but he talked about their histories, personalities and the extraordinary people he encountered during the course of his work. “He would come home and, you know, he would not use their names, of course, but he would talk about histories of people and these incredible folks that he got an opportunity to meet and work with and help while they were at their worst.” That left a lasting impression. “The idea of helping people in their worst moments was really attractive to me because of that,” Rogoff said.

That is an interesting foundation for a career in criminal law because the criminal justice system frequently encounters people at precisely those moments. Crime victims may be living through the worst event of their lives. Defendants may be facing the loss of freedom, family, reputation and livelihood. Witnesses can be frightened. Families can be devastated. Investigators can encounter violence and trauma repeatedly. Prosecutors make decisions that can change a person’s life in a matter of minutes.

Another influence came from Rogoff’s uncle, a successful attorney in Philadelphia who had previously been a prosecutor. Rogoff remembers reading about a particularly significant domestic violence case his uncle handled after leaving prosecution. His uncle was defending a woman who had killed her husband following a prolonged history of abuse, and the case involved an early use of self defense principles in the context of domestic violence. Rogoff remembered seeing newspaper coverage of the case. “There were pictures of them crying and hugging together,” he recalled.

Those experiences began shaping his understanding of what lawyers could do. The profession was not only about statutes, motions and argument. It could place someone beside another human being when that person was facing circumstances that might permanently alter the course of his or her life.

Rogoff attended Emory University before going to law school at the University of Washington. He went essentially straight from college into legal education and admits that he entered law school without much of the ordinary life experience that made some legal concepts immediately relatable. “I frankly, and I grew up privileged, I really didn’t know a lot,” he said. Some areas of law felt abstract. “I never had a mortgage before. I didn’t understand real property. I didn’t understand, you know, torts. That was all real strange to me.”

Criminal law was different. “I could definitely understand that you’re not supposed to hit someone over the head or that you’re not supposed to steal things.” There was also something about the moral architecture of criminal prosecution that appealed to him. “I didn’t like bullies,” Rogoff said. “And the idea of prosecuting people who had been bullies was real attractive to me.”

He wanted to be in court, and the prosecutor’s office offered an obvious path. He interned during law school and, after graduating, went to work for the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office. Rogoff began in district court handling cases such as DUIs and fourth degree assaults before moving through the office and eventually handling serious felony cases. He spent approximately thirteen years there and ultimately specialized substantially in domestic violence and sexual assault prosecutions.

Those years gave him one perspective on the justice system. The decades that followed would give him several others. Looking back now, Rogoff says one of the most important things he has learned is that human beings cannot always be neatly categorized according to the worst thing they have ever done. “Doing bad things doesn’t necessarily make you a bad person,” he told me.

That is not a declaration that people should escape responsibility. Rogoff spent much of his career prosecuting people. His point is about the limits of the justice system and the complexity of the people entering it. “There are a thousand reasons that people end up doing the things that get them in trouble and get them into the system,” he said. Those reasons can include addiction, trauma, poverty, greed, impulsivity, desperation, environment, coercion, opportunity and personal choice. Frequently several exist at the same time. Courts must nevertheless take enormously complicated human circumstances and process them through defined legal categories.

“The justice system is just not capable of answering all of those questions in the right way all the time because it’s just limited in what it can do,” Rogoff said. He described criminal behavior and the reasons people commit crimes as complicated and layered. “When people talk about the criminal justice system solving those problems for people and going to root causes and fixing things, it’s just a huge lift.”

That helps explain why public debates about criminal justice frequently sound so dissatisfied. Society asks courts to punish, deter, rehabilitate, incapacitate, compensate victims, protect constitutional rights, address addiction, confront mental health problems and fix social conditions that existed long before a particular defendant ever entered the courtroom. The system can do some of those things. It cannot reliably do all of them.

Rogoff believes that reality makes professional roles extraordinarily important. “The best thing that you can do as a person participating in or working in the justice system is to do your role incredibly well,” he said. That means prosecutors must understand what prosecutors are permitted to do. Defense attorneys must understand their obligations. Judges must remain within the authority granted to them. Investigators must gather evidence within legal and ethical boundaries.

“Following those rules and those strictures on what you’re allowed to do and not to do is so incredibly important.” Rogoff sees danger when people begin expanding their roles because they believe a particular outcome is desirable. “When prosecutors start trying to color outside the lines and fix things for defendants, when judges try to do more than they’re permitted to do, that’s when problems start to happen and the system starts to break down.”

That concept would follow him throughout his career. After his years in the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office, Rogoff eventually became an Assistant United States Attorney. He served as a federal prosecutor from 2007 through 2013 and worked in the Terrorism and Violent Crimes Unit, handling cases involving illegal firearms, gangs and violent crime. He also coordinated gang prosecutions and worked around matters involving child victims and sexual abuse.

The federal system brought him more deeply into investigations involving confidential sources, cooperating defendants and human intelligence. When I described my own experience as a source and cooperating witness and asked how prosecutors establish effective communication with someone who may be sitting across the table primarily because he wants a reduction in his sentence, Rogoff acknowledged the obvious reality. “Of course, the promise of a reduced sentence is a motivating factor for anyone who wants to be involved in that world.”

But incentives alone do not produce high quality information. The prosecutor still has to communicate. “You’ve got to be able to communicate it if you’re a prosecutor,” Rogoff said. “And it can’t be, you know, some high level, you know, using crazy language that people don’t understand.”

That observation seems almost too obvious until one considers how often professionals communicate using language developed primarily for other professionals. Prosecutors understand substantial assistance. Agents understand source classifications. Attorneys understand procedural terminology. Defendants may understand none of it.

“You’ve got to be able to talk people and not talk at them,” Rogoff said. That phrase matters. Talking at someone communicates authority. Talking to someone creates an exchange. “You need to be open to answering questions. You need to be able to help them understand what the risks and rewards are.”

Rogoff believes the same skill matters with juries and opposing attorneys. “Being able to talk to people in a normal way is incredibly important,” he said. “It’s incredibly important in that situation. It’s incredibly important when you’re talking to a jury, which is just a collection of people from all over the place. It’s an important skill when you’re talking to opposing counsel, because people are just people.”

That last phrase could almost serve as the subtitle for the entire conversation. People are just people. Titles do not eliminate psychology. Uniforms do not eliminate emotion. Robes do not eliminate ego. Criminal histories do not eliminate dignity. Law degrees do not automatically create wisdom. Security clearances do not automatically create curiosity. And credibility does not automatically come with authority.

“If you’re trying to negotiate a case and get a result that you want, having that ability to talk like a normal human is everything because people are going to trust that,” Rogoff said.

I asked him where he learned it. The ability to build rapport is frequently discussed within law enforcement, but it is difficult to teach in a classroom. Some investigators seem naturally capable of entering a room and making a stranger comfortable. Others can have decades of experience and still make every interaction feel like an interrogation.

Rogoff again returned to the dinner table. “I like people,” he said. “I like stories.” He remembers listening to his parents describe what had happened in their lives. “The idea of hearing stories from my mom and my dad about what they were doing was like the highlight of the day.”

That taught him something that became central to his professional life. “Listening, doing a lot of listening, especially when you’re younger, I think is essential to learning how to communicate with people.” Then came one of the most concise descriptions of communication I have heard in these interviews. “Listening is just the opposite end of talking and frankly, the more important end.”

Rogoff still teaches trial advocacy to law students, and he has developed a memorable way of explaining direct examination. “If you want to figure out how to do direct examination and you’re single, start going on a lot of first dates.”

The point is not the dating itself. The point is curiosity. You can sit across from another person and fire questions mechanically, making the conversation feel like a deposition, or you can genuinely want to know who that person is. “You can either do it in a super creepy way and they hate you and never talk to you again, or you can do it because you’re curious and interested and want to know more about them, in which case they’re going to be interested in giving you the information and maybe get a second date.”

My father, who joined us for the interview and spent years teaching communication, immediately recognized the principle. Genuine curiosity changes the experience of being questioned. The listener is not simply collecting data. The listener is demonstrating that the answer matters.

Rogoff agreed. “People are cool,” he said. He believes nearly everyone carries experiences that are rarely discussed but have profoundly shaped who they became. “Everyone has these experiences that they don’t talk about very much, and it forms who they are.” If the interviewer has enough patience, those experiences often reveal something worth understanding. “If you have enough patience and time to get to it, it’s usually worth your time.”

That principle goes directly to human source development. An effective source relationship cannot be reduced entirely to transactional exchange. Money can motivate. Sentence reduction can motivate. Revenge can motivate. Fear can motivate. Loyalty can motivate. Those incentives explain why someone agrees to participate. They do not necessarily explain why someone eventually trusts a handler enough to disclose the information that matters most.

Rogoff believes people have an intuitive ability to detect whether the person listening actually cares. “Human interaction and people believing that you care about what they say” is important, he said. Then he added the critical limitation. “The only way that they will actually believe it is if you do care about what they say. There’s no faking it.”

That should be required reading for anyone who thinks rapport is simply a collection of interviewing tricks. There are techniques that help communication. Asking open ended questions matters. Avoiding accusatory language can matter. Understanding the person’s background matters. Finding common ground can matter. But techniques are not authenticity.

A sophisticated source may have spent years around people attempting to manipulate him. A cooperating defendant may have participated in deception professionally. Someone operating inside a criminal organization may be unusually attentive to body language, inconsistency and ulterior motive. The interviewer who is merely performing curiosity may eventually be recognized as performing it.

Rogoff’s approach is different. Actually be curious. Actually listen. Actually care what the person is saying. Then verify it.

That final part is essential because human intelligence brings a second problem: people lie. Sometimes they intentionally lie. Sometimes they exaggerate. Sometimes they minimize. Sometimes they protect someone. Sometimes they protect themselves. Sometimes they misremember. Sometimes they honestly believe something that simply is not true.

I asked Rogoff how he approaches a witness or defendant who has strong reasons to deceive him. He resisted pretending that decades in court had given him some mystical ability to detect dishonesty. “I don’t profess to be an expert in divining the truth from people.”

Instead, he emphasizes preparation. “You’ve got to, first of all, know everything you possibly can about the situation that they’re going to be talking about so that you can honestly and fairly measure what they’re saying against the immutable facts that you know.”

That is the foundation. Before the conversation begins, know the case. Know the records. Know the timeline. Know what can be independently established. Know what cannot.

“If you go into a conversation with a critical witness whose truth telling is really important to your case or really important to the situation, and you haven’t taken the time to really know your case and know the situation as well as you can without them, then you’re at a disadvantage in figuring out whether they’re going to tell the truth.”

That is as applicable to intelligence work as it is to trial preparation. A human source should provide intelligence that can be tested against independently established information. If an investigator knows the source is describing a meeting that occurred on Tuesday, phone records may establish who was in the area. Cameras may establish when people arrived. Financial records may establish what happened afterward. Messages may corroborate portions of the account.

The source provides context. The evidence tests the source.

Rogoff then emphasizes patience. “Doing more listening than talking is incredibly important.” He recommends pushing for details. “Continuing to push for details, push for information, push for the things that folks wouldn’t know or wouldn’t be able to describe if they didn’t feel it, see it, touch it, smell it.”

That does not mean every detailed story is truthful. Skilled liars can provide detail. What detail provides is additional material that can be compared against facts.

The larger point is that credibility assessment requires concentration. “You can’t just sit there and sort of nod your head and be thinking of 100 different things while they’re talking to you,” Rogoff said. You have to actually be present. “You got to be in the moment, focused on what they’re saying, focused on how they’re saying it, focused on how it fits into everything else you know.”

That kind of listening is exhausting. “It takes emotional energy to listen carefully and really understand what people are saying.” Rogoff observed that good trial lawyers can finish an important witness interview or a long trial day utterly drained because listening at that level requires sustained concentration.

That resonated with me from the opposite side of the table. Long proffer sessions can feel equally exhausting for the person providing information. You are reconstructing conversations, relationships, transactions and decisions, sometimes stretching back years. The prosecutor and investigators may already know portions of the story. They may deliberately remain silent to see whether your account matches independent evidence. They may ask the same question several different ways.

The source is being evaluated constantly. So is the interviewer. That relationship can determine the quality of what follows.

Rogoff eventually carried these lessons from the prosecutor’s office to the bench. After serving as an Assistant United States Attorney, he became a King County Superior Court judge at the beginning of 2014.

Becoming a judge is a strange professional transition. Attorneys may spend decades watching judges, appearing before judges, criticizing judges privately and thinking about what they themselves would do differently. Then one day someone hands you a robe.

Rogoff acknowledged that there is training. “There is a PowerPoint presentation,” he joked. New judges receive a crash course and learn the procedural fundamentals. “They send you to judge school for a couple weeks to help you figure out the basics, nuts and bolts.”

But no training program can fully explain how it feels to suddenly become the person everyone is watching. “You have no idea how to do it until you start doing it.” Most experienced attorneys arrive with mental models accumulated over years. “You have those judges that you’ve been in front of who you loved, and that’s who you want to be.” Then you begin figuring it out for yourself.

Rogoff remembers his first day as a judge vividly. He entered an elevator at the courthouse and was riding toward his office when the doors opened on the floor housing prosecutors. Several prosecutors were waiting. One was an old friend. The friend looked at Rogoff, smiled and said, “Oh, hello, Your Honor,” while making quotation marks with his fingers.

Rogoff was fortunate to have people like that around him. “I am very fortunate to have friends and people in my orbit and people who I love who would never let the sort of fancy part of being a judge impact who I am and what I think and what’s important.”

That grounding becomes necessary because the social environment surrounding a judge changes dramatically. Everyone stands when you enter. People address you formally. Your words can carry enormous consequences. And, Rogoff discovered, your sense of humor suddenly improves.

“Suddenly everything you say is hilariously funny when you want to be funny,” he said. There is another phenomenon. “Everything you say is really smart, even if it’s not.”

That creates an unusual psychological problem. People calibrate themselves through feedback. We know whether a joke works because people laugh. We know whether an idea sounds absurd because someone challenges us. We know whether we are dominating a conversation because someone interrupts or disengages.

Judges do not receive ordinary feedback.

“It’s really hard to calibrate your behavior and your decision making when you’re not getting feedback from other people all the time,” Rogoff said. He considers that one of the hardest parts of judging.

When I described a judge as the captain of the ship, Rogoff pushed back in a way that completely reframed the role. “You could look at it as you’re the least important person in the room.”

That is an extraordinary thing to hear from someone who spent seven years occupying the most powerful chair in the courtroom.

Rogoff explained why. The judge may actually be the only person who will not be personally affected by the outcome. The defendant may lose freedom. The victim may be living with trauma. Family members may have waited years for resolution. Lawyers carry responsibilities to clients. Witnesses may have reorganized their lives to appear. The judge makes the decision, but the judge goes home afterward.

Rogoff compared the role to a referee. “You’re more of a referee who, if you’re watching, you know, a football game, is the least important participant on the field.”

That does not reduce judicial responsibility. It increases it. The judge has to communicate the decision carefully because everyone else has to live with it. “The key for you is to communicate the decisions you make so everyone understands them and to be really careful and thoughtful.”

Communication from the bench became extremely important to Rogoff because courts regularly make decisions that seem irrational to the people affected by them. A procedural restriction may have constitutional origins. A seemingly inconvenient requirement may protect another litigant’s rights. A judge may be legally prohibited from doing the thing everyone in the room thinks would be most practical.

Rogoff experienced this directly during the COVID era, when courts were trying to determine how centuries old constitutional rules applied to technology that had become necessary almost overnight. His courtroom participated in one of the early Zoom jury selection processes. “We did one of the very first Zoom jury selections in the country when COVID happened in my courtroom.”

What looked superficially like a technological problem was actually a constitutional one. “Trying to go through and figure out whether we were capable or allowed to do that, whether it was fair, whether it was constitutional, was insanely complicated.”

That experience reinforced his belief that judges should explain themselves. “What I think judges, what is really important for judges to do is to be really good at communicating to litigants and communicating to people whose lives are impacted by your decisions and make sure that people really understand what you’re saying and why you’re saying it.”

People may still disagree. They may still be angry. They may still appeal. But understanding why the court acted can preserve something important: legitimacy.

Rogoff’s time in juvenile court gave him another perspective on the relationship between authority and credibility. He encountered young people who had entered the system but had enormous potential. “One of the positives, especially when I worked in juvenile court, was getting to see kids that had been in front of me who were smart and were motivated, just had ended up in the wrong direction for a whole host of reasons.”

Some eventually graduated from high school. Rogoff made them a promise. “If you graduate, I’ll be there.” And when they graduated, he went. “Oh, yeah,” he said when I asked whether he had actually attended the ceremonies.

For a judge, attending a graduation might seem like a modest act. For the young person, it may have meant considerably more. The judge who once represented the authority of the justice system was now sitting in the audience because the person had accomplished something good.

Rogoff understood that judicial boundaries still mattered. “There’s limitations, right?” Judges cannot simply insert themselves into people’s lives. “You can’t get involved in the way that you might want to.” That could be frustrating. “One of the things about a judge, you can’t go out and fix anything and do anything.”

Judges have authority, but it is limited authority. “You have limited decisions you can make, and those decisions are limited by the law and what you’re allowed to do and what you’re not allowed to do.”

Juvenile court, particularly within an environment focused on reform, offered some additional flexibility. “It’s a little looser,” he said. “You have a little bit more ability to kind of draw outside the lines.”

Attending a graduation after the court’s involvement ended seemed like an appropriate way to acknowledge a young person’s progress. “It gave the juvenile an opportunity to prove something and to feel good about it and to have somebody who saw the struggle be there for them when it was over.”

My father, who participated in the interview, described it as recognition of redemption. That word fits. Criminal justice systems necessarily focus on past conduct. Redemption focuses on what happens afterward. Rogoff has seen both.

I told him something judges rarely hear directly from defendants: people in holding cells talk about judges constantly. Before going upstairs, defendants exchange information. Who did you get? Is the judge fair? Is the judge harsh? Does the judge listen? Does the judge explain things? Will the judge give someone a chance? It is an informal intelligence network operating beneath the courtroom. A judge’s reputation arrives before the judge does.

Rogoff understood why that matters. A judge does not need defendants to like him. A judge does want defendants to follow the court’s orders and ideally never return.

“What you really want is when they leave the courtroom after you handed down your decision or sentence or whatever you’re doing with them, that they follow through on the things that you want them to so that they don’t end up back there again.”

Then he said something that should probably be printed inside every criminal courthouse. “We don’t want more business, we want less business.” Respect can help. “If they respect you and they believe that you’re being fair, then I think it’s easier to get to that point.”

Fairness does not mean leniency. A judge can impose a significant sentence while remaining respectful. A prosecutor can aggressively prosecute a case while remaining professional. An investigator can confront a witness with contradictory evidence without humiliating that witness. Accountability and dignity are not opposites.

This became especially clear when I described one of the most difficult moments of my own interaction with the justice system. After receiving a lengthy federal prison sentence, I remember being escorted from the courtroom while devastated by what had happened. At nearly the same moment, I heard casual conversation among courtroom professionals about an ordinary family topic. To them, it was probably nothing. To me, it was unforgettable.

Rogoff immediately understood the larger issue. At Washington’s Office of Independent Investigations, he said, they discussed precisely this problem. Investigators working traumatic scenes develop coping mechanisms. Gallows humor exists for a reason. People who regularly encounter death cannot emotionally collapse every time they go to work. But context matters.

Rogoff explained that “what you say and then what you do in the moment” can determine how the public understands an investigation. “When you’re at a scene investigating a homicide, investigating a situation where a police officer killed someone, the media cannot catch you laughing and joking with your colleagues at the scene.”

The investigators may not be talking about the case. They may be trying to manage stress. They may be discussing something completely unrelated. It does not matter. “Nobody can see that in the moment, on camera at a scene, because you just lose trust and you lose credibility.”

That word appeared repeatedly during our discussion.

Credibility.

It is central to human intelligence. It is central to prosecution. It is central to judging. It is central to institutional legitimacy. And it became central to Rogoff’s next major role.

After leaving the bench and spending time in corporate legal work, Rogoff became director of Washington State’s Office of Independent Investigations. What attracted him was precisely that it had not been done before. “The first thing that attracted me to that job was it had never been done before.”

The concept was unusual: create an agency responsible for investigating incidents in which police seriously injured or killed someone without relying on current law enforcement officers to conduct the investigation. “There had never in this country been an agency whose job it was to investigate the behavior of the police when they seriously hurt or killed somebody without any current law enforcement being part of the investigation.”

That structure was intended to address one of the most persistent credibility problems surrounding police use of force investigations. If police investigate police, communities may question the independence of the process before investigators gather the first piece of evidence.

Rogoff saw an opportunity to build something different. He described it as “something that gives the community who are enduring these incidents when they happen some trust and some belief in the credibility of the investigative agency.”

The idea was straightforward. “If you’re investigating the cops, you’re not just another cop investigating other cops.”

Executing that idea was far more complicated. The new agency needed communities to trust it. Law enforcement also needed to believe the investigators understood what they were doing. The investigations had to be independent without becoming reflexively hostile toward police. They had to be technically competent without simply replicating traditional police investigative culture.

Rogoff found that challenge compelling. “The ability to do that in a credible way that made people, including law enforcement, including the community, believe that it was being done right, I just thought a really cool challenge that nobody had ever done.” He described the work as difficult but deeply rewarding. “It was really gratifying. Really hard, but really gratifying.”

His experience there changed the way he thinks about oversight. Oversight sounds uncomplicated in political rhetoric. Create an independent board. Assign an inspector. Appoint another reviewer. Require another report. Rogoff has seen why simply adding oversight does not necessarily produce accountability.

“Oversight can be really feckless and not very helpful when it’s just someone sort of watching what happened.”

The problem is epistemological. To properly evaluate a complicated institution, you need to understand it. But understanding often requires getting close to it. “In order to really know, you’ve got to get really involved.” And that creates the opposite problem. “Once you’re really involved, it’s hard to be unbiased.”

That is one of the most important institutional tensions in oversight. Distance creates independence but can undermine expertise. Proximity creates expertise but can undermine independence. A credible investigative body must somehow maintain both.

Rogoff therefore agrees that oversight matters, but he rejects the assumption that merely creating oversight solves the problem. “Oversight is a good thing, but making it work right is really difficult.”

That same balance appears constantly in human intelligence operations. A handler who is too distant from a source may never develop enough trust to obtain valuable information. A handler who becomes too personally invested may lose objectivity. An investigator who approaches every source as a liar may destroy communication. An investigator who believes everything a source says may destroy the case.

The job requires proximity without capture. Curiosity without gullibility. Empathy without blindness. Trust without abandoning verification.

Rogoff’s philosophy of listening becomes particularly valuable in that environment because he does not equate listening with believing. Listening is how you gather the information. Preparation and corroboration are how you test it.

That distinction also explains his advice to younger prosecutors. Law school teaches argument. Litigation rewards argument. Attorneys are trained to choose positions and defend them. That training becomes dangerous when every conversation turns into advocacy.

“As a lawyer, your job is to argue, right?” Rogoff said. “Your job is to persuade a judge or opposing counsel that the position you’ve taken is the right one.”

Young prosecutors can sometimes internalize that role too deeply. “They get into this mode of my case must be right, my argument must be right, because I’m the prosecutor.”

The prosecutor begins listening to defense counsel in order to rebut. Listening to witnesses in order to confirm. Listening to defendants in order to expose contradictions. Everyone becomes an opponent.

Rogoff believes that is a mistake. “They’re constantly listening to opposing counsel, listening to witnesses, listening to defendants in order to respond and in order to prove that they are indeed right.”

The better approach is to listen for understanding.

“If you’re right, that never will go away.”

A strong case does not become weak simply because a prosecutor understands the defense. “You will always have the opportunity to get in the courtroom and prove that you were right.”

Therefore, Rogoff sees remarkably little downside to genuine listening. “There is just no downside to just shutting up and listening when you’re not in the courtroom and understanding what people are telling you.”

That may be one of the hardest lessons for accomplished professionals to learn. Silence can feel passive. It is not. In an interview, silence can be analytical. In negotiation, silence can be strategic. In intelligence collection, silence can create space for information that would never emerge if the interviewer filled every pause.

Rogoff tells lawyers to ask good questions and then allow the answers to exist. “There’s just no downside to just being quiet, asking good questions and listening in order to understand what that person is saying.”

He also argues that understanding the opposing position actually strengthens advocacy. “I used to always tell lawyers, if you can make the other side’s argument more effectively than they can, then you’re probably in the position to win the case.”

That is an exceptionally useful concept outside of litigation. An investigator who can articulate the strongest innocent explanation for suspicious evidence has probably examined the evidence carefully. An intelligence analyst who can articulate the strongest competing hypothesis has probably tested the assessment. A prosecutor who understands precisely why the defense theory might persuade a jury is better prepared to address it.

Understanding an argument does not require agreeing with it. It requires intellectual discipline.

Rogoff’s career also demonstrates another form of discipline: treating cases according to their importance to the people involved rather than their importance to the press.

I asked him to identify a prosecution he was especially proud of. He could have named a large federal investigation. He could have identified something involving terrorism, gangs or organized crime. Instead, he talked about cases most people never heard about.

“I’ve done a lot of cases as a judge that got a lot of media attention and were really complex that I am proud of,” Rogoff said. But that was not where he wanted to focus. “I think it’s the cases that nobody cares about and nobody hears about that I’m most proud of doing well.”

He remembered sexual assault prosecutions that were extraordinarily consequential to the victims but received little public attention. “I had sexual assault cases that were unbelievably consequential to the people who were involved.”

Some involved people from communities that received very little media attention. “Because they involved underserved communities or kids of color or kids who sort of, in the media’s world, didn’t matter, nobody cared.”

No reporters came. “Nobody showed up.” Nobody wanted an interview. “Nobody from the media wanted to be a part of it.”

But the consequences were enormous to the people living through those cases. “It is the work I did on those cases, the hard work I did on those cases, and the care I put into them that I’m most proud of.”

That answer says something important about professional maturity. Public institutions are vulnerable to headline gravity. The largest investigation receives attention. The most famous defendant receives resources. The sensational prosecution becomes part of someone’s biography.

But justice is experienced individually.

For the victim in a case nobody covers, that case is still everything.

Rogoff has watched enough of the system to recognize that distinction. “Time and experience for a lot of people who are in this system sort of teach you, if you’re listening, if you’re paying attention, it teaches you what’s important.”

Again, that qualifier appears.

If you’re listening.

Experience by itself does not guarantee wisdom. Experience can just as easily produce cynicism. A prosecutor can become hardened. A judge can become dismissive. An investigator can begin believing every person is lying. A defense attorney can assume every government action is malicious.

Experience becomes valuable only when someone allows it to alter his understanding.

Rogoff’s time as a judge appears to have done precisely that. He had spent years advocating. Then he had to sit between advocates. He had spent years asking judges to rule. Then he became responsible for explaining why a ruling was right. He had spent years thinking about cases from the prosecution’s perspective. Then he had to evaluate the entire case without belonging to either side.

One of the most difficult aspects was recognizing how much authority can distort ordinary human interaction. The courtroom is not a normal social environment. People do not speak to judges the way they speak to everyone else. Few people tell the judge that a joke was bad. Few tell the judge that an explanation was confusing. Few tell the judge that he is talking too much.

Friends outside the courthouse therefore became valuable precisely because they were unwilling to participate in the mythology of the robe.

That humility influences Rogoff’s view of institutional power more generally. Rules matter. Roles matter. Boundaries matter.

That theme also surfaced when our conversation briefly turned toward disputes over the structure of federal prosecutorial authority. Rogoff framed his concern around process. “We all have roles in the criminal justice system.” Those roles are not arbitrary. “Those roles ultimately are created by the Constitution and the law.”

Rogoff’s concern is what happens when officials stop respecting them. “If you are in the criminal justice system or the justice system generally, and you aren’t abiding by your role, then the system starts to break down.”

That is why process matters even when the desired outcome seems obvious. “It’s incredibly important to me that we follow the law and we do what we’re supposed to do.”

The rule cannot simply be that everyone obeys the process when the process produces the result they want. That concept connects directly to Rogoff’s earlier warning about prosecutors and judges coloring outside the lines. Institutions are strongest when powerful people voluntarily remain within the limits of their authority. The limits matter most when ignoring them would be convenient.

Today, after moving through all of those positions, Rogoff has returned to trial practice. He is working with a Seattle law firm where he had previously practiced before returning to public service.

“The folks I was working for right before I got appointed has been lovely to me and, of course, welcomed me back,” he said.

The work allows him to continue helping people through difficult circumstances. “I continue to help people. That’s what I’m doing with them.”

His practice includes medical malpractice, civil rights and other litigation. “It’s an important practice and we help people who have been hurt or been injured and we help people who aren’t being treated right and trying to make sure that they do get treated right and get the help that they need.”

Rogoff is not simply advising from a distance. “I’m working cases.” That has been meaningful after years of managing institutions and occupying roles where the responsibilities were much broader.

“For the first time in a long time I just get to focus on, you know, my cases, my clients, my things and get to work toward a trial.”

He hopes to return fully to what originally attracted him to law. “Hopefully get to start trying cases again, which would be amazing.”

There is an elegant circularity to that. The young lawyer who entered prosecution because he wanted to stand in court eventually spent decades moving through nearly every major role surrounding the courtroom. Now he is back preparing cases for trial.

But he returns with a perspective he could not possibly have possessed at the beginning. He knows what prosecutors see. He knows what defense lawyers see. He knows what judges see. He knows what investigators see. He knows what institutional leaders worry about. He knows what oversight can accomplish and where it can fail. He knows how much authority can distort feedback. He knows how much credibility matters.

And above everything else, he knows how much information can disappear when professionals stop listening.

That is why Roger Rogoff’s career belongs within a publication devoted to human intelligence. HUMINT is sometimes discussed in technical vocabulary: recruitment, placement, access, validation, motivation, handling, reporting and corroboration. Those concepts matter tremendously. But there is a simpler reality beneath all of them.

There is a human being sitting across the table.

That person has a story. That person has motives. That person has fears. That person has loyalties. That person may be telling the truth. That person may be lying. Usually the person is doing something more complicated than either.

The professional sitting across from that person has all of those characteristics too.

That is why communication cannot be separated from intelligence. The relationship affects what gets said. What gets said affects what gets investigated. What gets investigated affects what gets corroborated. What gets corroborated may eventually become evidence. Evidence becomes decisions. Decisions alter lives.

Rogoff has witnessed that chain from almost every possible position. His advice is not glamorous. Know the case before interviewing the witness. Ask questions because you actually want answers. Talk to people instead of talking at them. Do not confuse incentives with credibility. Do not confuse credibility with truth. Push for details. Corroborate what can be corroborated. Recognize your own role. Do not allow authority to convince you that you are automatically correct.

And listen.

Really listen.

The phrase Rogoff used earlier deserves repeating because it may encapsulate the entire discussion: “Listening is just the opposite end of talking and frankly, the more important end.”

That lesson applies far beyond courtrooms. Modern investigations increasingly rely on extraordinary technical capabilities. Phones can expose networks. Cameras can reconstruct movement. Financial systems can identify patterns. Digital forensics can recover conversations people thought had disappeared. Artificial intelligence can process information at a scale that would once have required teams of analysts.

But technology does not automatically explain human behavior.

A machine can tell an investigator that two people communicated. It may not explain why. A surveillance camera can show someone entering a building. It may not explain what happened inside. A bank record can show money moving. It may not explain what the payment meant. A wiretap can capture a phrase. It may not explain the coded significance understood by the people speaking.

Eventually someone has to interpret.

Often that person is a human source.

And eventually someone has to decide whether that source is credible.

That person is also human.

This is why technical sophistication cannot replace interpersonal competence. The investigator who cannot listen may fail despite possessing excellent technology. The prosecutor who cannot understand the defendant’s explanation may misunderstand the case. The judge who cannot explain a decision may issue a legally correct ruling that nevertheless damages confidence in the institution. The oversight agency that cannot establish credibility may produce an accurate investigation nobody trusts. The leader who does not understand how behavior appears to the public may lose legitimacy in seconds.

Rogoff has lived through versions of all of those problems.

His conclusion is not that communication solves everything. It does not. People will still lie. Investigations will still fail. Judges will still make mistakes. Prosecutors will still disagree with defense attorneys. Communities will still distrust institutions.

But communication determines whether those institutions have any chance of understanding the people they serve.

“People are just people,” Rogoff said.

That may sound obvious. It is surprisingly easy to forget.

The defendant becomes a case number. The witness becomes a statement. The informant becomes a source identifier. The victim becomes a file. The police officer becomes a subject. The judge becomes an institution. The prosecutor becomes the government.

The human being disappears behind the role.

Rogoff’s career suggests that the best professionals resist that transformation. They remember that there is still a person there. That recognition does not make justice weaker. It makes judgment better.

You can hold someone accountable while listening to them. You can distrust a source while treating the source with dignity. You can challenge a witness while remaining curious about the answer. You can impose a sentence while explaining why. You can investigate police officers while respecting the difficulty of police work. You can represent someone injured by an institution without assuming everyone inside the institution acted maliciously. You can advocate fiercely while still understanding the strongest argument against you.

None of those positions require surrender.

They require discipline.

Rogoff has spent decades developing that discipline. The young prosecutor who once wanted to stand up to bullies eventually learned that the human beings arriving in criminal court could not always be divided neatly into good people and bad people. The federal prosecutor learned that cooperating witnesses and human sources could provide the context that transformed evidence into understanding. The judge learned that being the most powerful person in the courtroom did not necessarily make him the most important. The juvenile court judge learned that sometimes showing up at a graduation could matter just as much as something said from the bench. The investigative director learned that independence without credibility is insufficient and that credibility can disappear through something as ordinary as the appearance of laughter at the wrong moment. The trial lawyer learned that the strongest advocate is often the person capable of understanding the opposing argument better than the opposition itself.

And throughout all of those transitions, the same skill kept appearing.

Listening.

Not the performative listening used while constructing the next rebuttal. Not waiting for someone to stop speaking. Not searching selectively for confirmation.

Listening to understand.

For anyone working in intelligence, investigations, prosecution, law enforcement or leadership, that distinction is consequential because the quality of the information you receive is often connected to the quality of the relationship you establish with the person providing it. The quality of your judgment is often connected to how seriously you considered the information contradicting what you already believed. Authority may compel someone to sit across from you, but authority cannot compel honesty.

Credibility helps. Preparation helps. Curiosity helps. Respect helps.

And listening may matter most of all.

Roger Rogoff has spent more than three decades learning that lesson from nearly every side of the American justice system. His career includes titles that can easily fill a biography, but the most useful thing he offered during our conversation was not a title, a verdict or a famous case. It was a way of approaching another human being.

Know what you can before you walk into the room. Ask the question. Pay attention to the answer. Allow yourself to understand what the other person is actually saying before deciding how you are going to respond.

And remember that sometimes the most important intelligence in the room begins to emerge only after the person with the most authority stops talking.

Eric Balliet entered federal law enforcement at a moment when the profession, and the country surrounding it, was about to change permanently. He began as a Border Patrol agent in 1999 before being hired as a special agent with the United States Customs Service in 2001. His academy class had not even started when history intervened. Balliet was supposed to be sworn in on September 10, but a scheduling issue pushed the ceremony back a day. On the morning of September 11, 2001, as the country watched aircraft strike the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and federal agencies scrambled to understand the dimensions of the attack, Balliet was inside a federal office waiting to formally begin the next chapter of his career. “I was supposed to get sworn in on that Monday, which was the 10th,” he recalled. The ceremony was postponed until Tuesday. “Tuesday morning planes flew into the Towers and the Pentagon and it was chaos. And in the midst of that chaos, the SAC pulled me up into his office, swore me in and signed the oath of office.” It is difficult to imagine a more consequential first day in federal law enforcement. Balliet had not yet attended the academy, had not qualified with his weapon and did not even have a badge, but the institution he had joined was already beginning a transformation that would eventually reshape his entire career.

That transformation became one of the defining experiences of Balliet’s professional life. He had come from the Border Patrol in Nogales, Arizona, and after September 11 watched the federal government dismantle and reorganize institutions that had existed for generations. The United States Customs Service and Immigration and Naturalization Service were broken apart, the Department of Homeland Security was created, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection emerged from the restructuring. Balliet experienced those changes not as a historian looking backward but as an agent living through them. “What it did lay the foundation for was watching the creation of DHS, the breaking apart of U.S. Customs and INS, the creation of ICE and CBP, all of those growing pains,” he said. His assessment of the early years is not romanticized. “That was a shit show between 2003 to 2006, 2007,” Balliet said, adding that one could argue the system had only “marginally improved.” For him, the larger question is whether the institutions that emerged after September 11 still resemble the mission for which they were originally designed. “When you boil it down, that was really the intent of the Homeland Security Act of 2002,” he said of preventing another catastrophic attack. Looking at the department more than two decades later, Balliet believes the structure has evolved far beyond that original framework. “I would take the side that it has morphed into something that was far beyond the framework and intention.”

Balliet’s career eventually took him through the evolution of what became Homeland Security Investigations , but much of the professional identity he describes was forged along the Southwest border. There are federal law enforcement assignments, and then there is the border. Agents who have spent significant portions of their careers there often describe it less as an assignment than as an operational environment with its own rhythm, culture and intensity. Balliet spent roughly fifteen years in Southern Arizona, and his description captures the contradiction of a place that could simultaneously produce some of the most rewarding and stressful years of an agent’s career. “There really is no downtime,” he said. “For the 15 years I was there, it was the most fun coupled with the most stress, like operational stress, that I’ve ever experienced.” Controlled deliveries, wire intercepts, visiting agents, investigative leads, cross border activity, trafficking organizations and interagency operations were not occasional events. They were the routine. “It is just a grind,” Balliet said. Yet that grind also created a distinctive bond among people who had experienced it. “Within the interagency, there’s a mutual respect,” he explained. An ATF agent in Tucson, an HSI agent in Nogales or Douglas, a DEA agent working the same corridor could look at another veteran of the border and immediately recognize a shared experience. “Oh yeah, you were there. You get it. You understand the grind that is the Southwest border.”

The grind was driven in part by the enormous scale and compartmentalization of transnational criminal organizations operating between Mexico and the United States. Popular culture often imagines a drug trafficking organization as a hierarchy in which everyone understands the larger enterprise. Balliet saw something much more fragmented. The people physically transporting narcotics were frequently separated by layers from the people directing the organization. “We would see it all the time, and it was so compartmentalized,” he explained. A person might receive a few hundred dollars to pick up a vehicle in Nogales, Sonora, cross into Nogales, Arizona, and leave it in a parking lot. Someone else would retrieve the vehicle and move it north to Tucson. “It was this leapfrog of mules,” Balliet said. Many participants knew remarkably little about the organization beyond their immediate instruction. Some knew narcotics were hidden in the vehicle. Others knew only that they were being paid to move something from one location to another. That compartmentalization protected the people higher in the organization while leaving the lowest participants exposed to arrest and prosecution.

For investigators attempting to penetrate those organizations, human sources were therefore not merely helpful. They could become the only practical means of moving beyond the replaceable couriers and into the architecture of the organization itself. Technical surveillance could identify movement. A seizure could establish that narcotics were present. A telephone number could connect one participant to another. Financial records could expose transactions. But a human being with genuine access could explain why those events were occurring, who was directing them, who actually held influence and what was likely to happen next. That is where Balliet’s career becomes particularly relevant to the mission of The Human Intelligence Ledger. His experience controlling confidential sources convinced him that successful human intelligence depends on something that institutional policies can regulate but can never manufacture: trust.

One source in particular stayed with Balliet long after the investigations ended. In his book, Balliet refers to the man as Omar, and during our conversation he described him as Omar. Balliet calls him “the most interesting individual that I’ve ever encountered in my 25 year career.” He came from a prominent drug trafficking family in Sonora, spoke fluent English and lived on both sides of the border. His relatives included significant figures within the trafficking environment, and his access gave Balliet a view into a world that outsiders could rarely penetrate. Yet what Balliet remembers most vividly is not simply the intelligence the man provided. He remembers the conversations. Driving around together while Omar identified stash houses, Balliet found himself genuinely interested in how the man had grown up and how his world worked. “I’d be genuinely interested. I’d be asking him questions. I’m like, dude, so, like, what was it like?” That curiosity became part of their relationship because Balliet was not pretending to be interested in order to extract the next piece of information. He actually wanted to understand the person sitting beside him.

That distinction goes directly to Balliet’s philosophy of source handling. He rejects the idea that possessing a badge places the investigator on some higher human plane than the person providing information. “I think the most effective way, yes, you’re on different sides of the fence, but when you factor in the human factor and you treat people, you just talk to them like a normal person,” Balliet said. “You’re not better than them. You’re not superior.” In his view, federal law enforcement can sometimes develop precisely the wrong instinct. “A lot of these, in my opinion, especially the feds, there’s a superiority complex that attaches.” That attitude may establish authority, but authority is not the same thing as trust. A confidential source can be ordered to follow certain operational rules, but an investigator cannot order that person to genuinely trust him. Balliet found that trust developed when the artificial hierarchy was stripped away enough for two people to recognize each other as human beings. “When you just relate to someone on a human level, it fosters that sense of not just trust, but it’s like, oh, you’re just a dude. I’m just a dude. You made different choices than I did.”

There is an important distinction in that philosophy. Treating a source with humanity does not require pretending the criminal conduct never happened, nor does it require an investigator to abandon professional boundaries. Balliet’s approach was to recognize the choices while refusing to reduce the entire person to those choices. “I’m not judging you for what you did,” he described telling sources in essence. “Let’s figure out what we can do together. And I’m gonna do what I can to make sure that your health, safety and well being is looked after, and this is what I’m looking for.” That exchange contains the foundation of an effective source relationship. Expectations are explicit. The investigator has objectives. The source understands those objectives. But the source also understands that the person handling him recognizes the risks involved and accepts responsibility for protecting him to the extent reasonably possible.

Omar and Balliet worked together for years. The relationship survived investigations, arrests, shifting assignments and eventually Balliet’s own movement into senior leadership. It also survived beyond the point when Omar was actively working as a source. That matters because one of the least discussed aspects of confidential source management is what happens after the operational relationship ends. Policies can close a source file. An agency can transfer control of a source from one agent to another. A case can end. A prosecutor can obtain convictions. The human relationship does not necessarily disappear simply because the administrative relationship has concluded. Balliet stayed in contact with Omar into the final years of his government career. What remained between them eventually had almost nothing to do with investigations.

Every Christmas Eve, Omar called him.

There was no intelligence request attached to the call. There was no operational agenda, no demand for assistance, no attempt to trade information for consideration. It was simply one man calling another after years of shared experience. “He would call me every Christmas Eve just to say Merry Christmas,” Balliet recalled. “That’s it, like man to man. Hey, I hope you’re enjoying your Christmas. Have a great Christmas.” Balliet still remembers what those calls meant to him because Omar had a family of his own and any number of people he could have contacted, yet every year he took thirty seconds to call the former agent who had once handled him. “It sounds cheesy, but I was like, man, that actually means a lot.” Omar would sometimes tell Balliet that he understood why he was free to celebrate the holiday with his family. “He would tell me, ‘I know I’m celebrating Christmas because of you helping me out and I’m not in prison.’” Balliet’s response was equally uncomplicated. “Hey, dude, enjoy it. Enjoy the time with the kids, enjoy the time with the wife. We’ll talk in the new year. Merry Christmas to you and your family too.”

There is an entire philosophy of human intelligence contained inside those thirty second calls. The relationship had begun because one man possessed access and another represented the government. It endured because, somewhere along the way, the relationship became more human than the original arrangement. “Nothing governmental, nothing like quid pro quo. What do you got for me? What can you do for me?” Balliet said. “Just two dudes saying, hey, I hope you have a good Christmas.” This does not erase the reality that one had been an agent and the other a member of a trafficking family. It demonstrates something more complicated. Human intelligence requires people to occupy two realities simultaneously. The investigator must never forget the professional relationship or the legal and operational responsibilities attached to it, but he also cannot become so consumed by those roles that he stops seeing the individual across from him.

The relationship became even more complicated because Omar’s life was never far removed from the violence of the trafficking world. Members of his family were killed. His brother was killed. Three uncles were killed. His mother died, and even attending her funeral became a security calculation because of cartel alignments and territorial conflict. Balliet remembered that Omar needed permission from a surviving uncle to attend because the funeral took place in territory associated with the Beltrán Leyva organization while Omar was perceived as aligned with Sinaloa. These were not abstract cartel maps. They governed where a person could travel to mourn his own mother without being killed. For an investigator controlling a source in that environment, the operational risk was inseparable from the source’s personal life.

One seemingly insignificant encounter in Tucson remained particularly vivid for Balliet. He and his wife were eating at a Mexican restaurant when he noticed Omar with several other men. Omar saw him as well. Neither acknowledged the other directly because neither knew what the people surrounding them knew. As Omar left, however, he passed Balliet and gave him a subtle elbow bump. Balliet laughed. His wife asked whether he knew the man. “I’m like, yeah, that’s Omar. She’s like, ‘That’s Omar? Why didn’t he say anything?’” Balliet explained that neither man would put the other in that position. “I don’t know who he’s with. He’s not gonna put you in a position, and he knows I’m not gonna put him in a position where there’s an acknowledgment.” The entire exchange lasted seconds. There was no conversation and no dramatic reunion. Yet years later Balliet still remembered the restaurant and the elbow bump because both men understood exactly what it meant. “Just little stuff like that,” he said. “You run into him and he knows that you’re not gonna out him, and he still gives you a little elbow bump on the way out.”

Eventually, the calls stopped.

Omar had already survived one kidnapping. After he was released, he contacted Balliet through WhatsApp and sent photographs of the injuries. By that point Balliet was a deputy special agent in charge in Denver, nowhere near the operational relationship they had once maintained. Omar was no longer his source. Yet when something terrible happened, he still contacted Balliet. “He reached out to me on WhatsApp and he was showing me pictures. The poor guy got the living shit kicked out of him,” Balliet recalled. The injuries were severe enough that Balliet could see marks where Omar appeared to have been struck with a board. Omar told him he had gone into the wrong town and believed he could get away with it. He had miscalculated. He was captured, beaten, tased and eventually released.

Approximately a year later, Omar went into Mexico again. Balliet believes he may have traveled to pay respects to his mother. This time he did not return. Months passed before Balliet learned what had happened. He eventually contacted Omar’s former wife and asked where he was. Her answer was devastatingly simple. “He went down and never came back and no one’s heard from him since.” Balliet does not claim to know exactly what happened. In that environment, certainty can be impossible. But he believes the man he had known for nearly two decades was kidnapped and killed. “They’ll probably never find his body,” he said.

The loss affected Balliet in a way that cannot be explained through the clinical terminology of confidential source management. “It really, it really bothered me when I found out that he went missing in Mexico,” he said. “You know someone for that long and you kind of go through your ups. It’s almost like any other relationship. You go through your ups and downs.” Balliet knew about Omar’s family. He had spoken with his wife. He knew his history, his environment and the circumstances that had shaped him. “It just personalizes things,” Balliet said. That personalization is precisely what bureaucratic language struggles to capture. On paper, Omar could be described as a confidential source connected to a significant Sonoran trafficking family. In Balliet’s memory, he was a man who called every Christmas Eve.

Omar also understood himself with unusual clarity. “He’d always call me, like, ‘I’m a criminal. That’s all I know. I know drug trafficking and that’s what I grew up with,’” Balliet recalled. Balliet did not excuse the conduct, but neither did he pretend that a person born into a trafficking family in northern Sonora had encountered the same choices as someone raised far from that world. “Candidly, I don’t fault you, man. You’re from northern Sonora,” he remembered thinking. “His family members were basically plaza bosses and stuff like that. That’s what he knew.” For Balliet, the critical characteristic was honesty. Omar understood who he was and did not attempt to manufacture a more respectable biography for the agent sitting beside him.

That same ability to see complexity emerged elsewhere in Balliet’s career. He recalled the arrest of Serafín Zambada Ortiz, a son of Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada and brother of Vicente Zambada Niebla. Serafín had an outstanding warrant from San Diego when he arrived through Nogales. Balliet, then serving in leadership in Nogales, went to the port partly to ensure that the arrest was handled professionally and that officers did not compromise another agency’s investigation by questioning him improperly or searching through material simply because they had recognized his identity. Balliet remembered something that might surprise people who know the Zambada name only through headlines about the Sinaloa Cartel. “Kid spoke almost perfect English and was the most respectful,” he recalled. Serafín declined to talk substantively, but did so calmly. “He was just like, ‘Hey, you know, I’m not gonna talk to you,’” Balliet said. “He was just a down to earth kid.” Balliet’s point was not to sanitize the family or diminish the allegations surrounding it. It was that the human being standing in front of an investigator is frequently more complicated than the public identity attached to his name.

That ability to separate understanding from endorsement is critical in human intelligence. Investigators who cannot become curious about people they disapprove of will struggle to understand the organizations they are trying to penetrate. Criminal networks are human ecosystems. They contain family relationships, friendships, resentments, rivalries, ambitions, loyalties and betrayals. People enter those environments for different reasons and remain for different reasons. The investigator who sees nothing beyond “criminal” may obtain compliance through leverage. The investigator who understands the person has a chance to obtain something more valuable: trust.

Balliet is equally clear that trust does not eliminate risk. Source relationships can become corrupted, and the very intimacy that makes human intelligence productive can become dangerous when boundaries collapse. He pointed to a federal corruption case involving an HSI agent and a source as an example of what can happen when oversight, judgment and professional integrity fail. Balliet was asked to testify as an expert witness in litigation related to the source. His larger concern extends beyond a single case. Positions involving confidential sources carry extraordinary trust, and lowering hiring, vetting or training standards increases institutional vulnerability. “The risk that the agency is taking on when you lower standards and hire subpar individuals for these very high profile positions of trust, those situations exponentially increase,” Balliet said. Agencies need mature vetting, recurring background investigations and serious internal oversight precisely because source work gives agents access to money, sensitive information, criminal networks and people who may themselves be skilled at manipulation.

Balliet sees historical parallels in current federal law enforcement staffing and organizational pressures. “It’s that old adage, right? If you don’t learn from history, you’re destined to repeat it,” he said. Having entered federal service before the post September 11 restructuring and retired in 2024, he has watched institutional cycles from the inside. “When I got hired in 2001, sworn in on 9/11, I’ve seen what’s happened between the immediacy of 9/11 and when I retired in 2024,” he said. “We’re basically rewinding the clock to 2002.” His warning is fundamentally about institutional memory. Government agencies can become so focused on solving the crisis directly in front of them that they forget why safeguards were created after the previous crisis.

That concern also informs Balliet’s criticism of what he believes HSI has become. He describes an agency originally built around transnational criminal investigations increasingly being used as a federal law enforcement utility player. “They become like this Swiss Army knife of federal law enforcement,” he said. Agents are pulled toward border support, protective assignments, fraud matters and other missions that may be important in themselves but can draw personnel away from the long term investigative work for which HSI possesses distinctive expertise. Balliet believes this creates an operational problem because complex transnational cases cannot simply be switched on and off according to staffing demands. “Why do I go out and cultivate human sources to do high level money laundering, drug trafficking, human smuggling investigations?” he asked rhetorically. “Because those take time to develop. It takes time to build the trust with the source and then, vice versa, develop those cases.”

A source relationship might take months or years to mature. A complicated money laundering investigation may depend upon a source becoming progressively more trusted within a criminal organization. A human smuggling investigation may require an agent to maintain constant contact with someone whose safety depends upon discretion. Then an agent can be told on Thursday that he must report to another city for an extended assignment on Monday. Balliet’s criticism is that leadership can unintentionally treat investigations as though they are administrative files that can simply be paused. “Frankly, nobody in leadership really appears to care about the status or the significance of whatever complex investigations are taking place,” he said of the institutional tendency he sees developing. He acknowledged that the observation may be provocative, calling it a “tinderbox statement,” but his concern is rooted in the operational reality that human intelligence cannot be developed according to a bureaucratic calendar.

This is where Balliet draws a sharp distinction between leadership and management. During his career, he says he worked for exceptional leaders and terrible bosses, and the difference was not rank. “Number one is bosses that are actual leaders and not managers,” he said. The strongest leaders became genuinely invested in the success of the investigation and the people conducting it. They understood that their role at senior levels was not to insert themselves into every surveillance operation or dictate decisions to subject matter experts. Their responsibility was to create the environment in which those experts could succeed. “They break down barriers at the upper echelons so that essentially the line agents and the immediate group supervisors can focus on what the objectives are for that particular case.”

Balliet used a particularly vivid description for one of the functions of strong leadership. Good leaders become “shit shields.” They absorb the bureaucratic pressure coming from headquarters, Washington and senior management so agents can concentrate on the investigation. “They act as shit shields when headquarters or D.C. is asking questions or wanting updates or justification for X, Y or Z,” he said. “They trust and they back their people, and they essentially clear the runway so that the subject matter experts can actually do their job.” This does not mean leadership becomes disengaged. The opposite is true. The best leaders understand the investigation well enough to know what obstacles their people are facing, but they do not confuse involvement with micromanagement.

Balliet remembers former Arizona leadership as an example of what that looked like when done correctly. He specifically recalled longtime SAC Matt Allen and briefings involving major investigations, including wire intercept cases connected to Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán. Allen, Balliet said, could not be manipulated by inflated claims. “You couldn’t bullshit him. You couldn’t upsell him or anything like that.” But once Allen understood that the investigators knew what they were doing and had legitimate objectives, the conversation changed. “The next question out of his mouth was, ‘What do you need from me? What can I do to help? What can I do to make this or set this up for success?’” Balliet said. “At that point, you knew you were in the best possible position.” That question, what do you need from me, is perhaps one of the clearest distinctions between a leader and a manager. The manager asks whether the subordinate has complied with the process. The leader asks what obstacle he can remove.

Interagency relationships function according to many of the same principles. Balliet spent parts of his career working alongside DEA, ATF, FBI, Border Patrol and other federal partners. Rivalries exist, as they do inside almost every large institution, but he believes the strongest investigators learn to put organizational identity behind the mission. His relationship with retired DEA leader Ray Donovan is one example. Balliet described Donovan as “as down to earth as you can get,” despite eventually becoming one of DEA’s most senior officials. He also praised Donovan and Derek Maltz for being willing to move beyond agency competition. “They were kind of two of the ones that really put the badges aside and were like, hey, what do we want to accomplish?”

That philosophy became particularly visible during tragedies that erased ordinary institutional rivalries. Balliet knew HSI Special Agent Victor Avila and worked with him during a major human smuggling wire investigation in which Avila served as a point of contact in Mexico. He did not personally know Special Agent Jaime Zapata, who was murdered in Mexico in 2011, but members of Balliet’s tactical community knew him and felt the loss deeply. “That was tough,” Balliet said. “Guys that were in his academy class were on SRT with me, and they took it hard. He was a pretty well liked guy from everything that I heard.” In moments like that, the artificial boundaries between agencies become secondary. The mission becomes personal because the people involved understand that another agent was operating inside the same dangerous environment.

Balliet’s professional friendships also crossed agency lines throughout his career. “I have probably better friends in Drug Enforcement Administration than a number of people in HSI,” he said. His first assignment after the academy placed him on a DEA task force, and the relationships created there lasted. “Those dudes are like, I mean, I would do anything for them. They’d do anything for me.” The problem, in his view, emerges when institutional politics interferes with those organic relationships. “When politics get in the way, it unfortunately muddies the mission.” At the working level, however, agents frequently understand something leadership can forget: nobody owns the threat. Narcotics trafficking, organized crime, human smuggling, terrorism and transnational criminal networks do not respect agency organizational charts.

The same principle applies to confidential sources. An agency may technically own a source file, but trust belongs to the relationship. Balliet is skeptical of the assumption that a productive source can simply be reassigned through administrative direction. “I think what leadership fails to recognize is that just because you’re like, ‘Okay, hey, Mr. Confidential Source, you’re now working for this person,’ it doesn’t work like that.” Agencies have legitimate reasons for limiting how long one agent controls a particular source. Long relationships can create complacency, dependency, boundary problems and corruption risks. Balliet understands why those policies exist. But policies do not change human psychology. “It has to be cultivated and crawl, walk, run and trust and communication and all that,” he said.

His experience with Omar demonstrates the point. Balliet had spent years protecting the source’s identity while developing investigations from his information. “I kept that dude off the stand and we arrested tons of people off his information and deals and stuff like that and protected him,” Balliet said. That history cannot simply be transferred to another agent with a memorandum. The new handler can inherit the administrative responsibility, but the new relationship still has to be built. The source must decide whether the new person can be trusted with the same information, the same fears and the same vulnerabilities. That process is exactly what Balliet means by crawl, walk, run.

There is also a deeper psychological reality involved in long term source handling. Investigators and sources may spend years navigating circumstances in which exposure can lead to prison or death. They know things about one another that ordinary professional colleagues may never know. The source reveals criminal conduct, fears, family relationships and vulnerabilities. The handler may become the person the source calls when something goes wrong. Balliet’s relationship with Omar survived long enough that when Omar was kidnapped and tortured years later, he contacted the former agent who had once handled him. That is not something an agency can create through policy. It is the residue of trust.

The danger is that law enforcement can misunderstand what creates that trust. A badge creates legal authority, not personal credibility. A source can comply with an agent while privately distrusting him. Balliet has encountered the mentality that a source should simply recognize the hierarchy and obey. “There are people that have like, ‘Hey, you work for me. I’m better than you. You’re gonna do what I say without question.’” That may produce short term compliance, but it is a poor foundation for sophisticated human intelligence. A source who feels disrespected has numerous ways to manipulate the relationship. He can withhold information, exaggerate, provide partial truths, redirect investigators toward rivals, fabricate access or simply disappear.

Balliet’s alternative sounds almost embarrassingly simple: talk to people like people. The simplicity should not be confused with ease. Doing it effectively requires enough confidence that an investigator does not need to constantly demonstrate authority. It requires curiosity without gullibility, empathy without naivety, boundaries without contempt and skepticism without dehumanization. It requires an investigator to understand that the person sitting across from him may have committed serious crimes and may still possess qualities worthy of respect. That psychological flexibility is difficult for people who need the world divided cleanly between good people and bad people.

Balliet’s career along the Southwest border made such simplistic categories almost impossible to maintain. The people involved in trafficking organizations were sometimes born into families where criminality was intertwined with ordinary life. That did not absolve them of responsibility, but it affected how they understood the world and the choices available to them. The source who told Balliet “I’m a criminal. That’s all I know” was not offering a legal defense. He was explaining his identity. For an investigator interested in human intelligence, understanding that identity is operationally useful. If you understand how a person sees himself, you begin to understand what he values, what he fears and what might motivate him.

The border magnifies those dynamics because the consequences of cooperation can be immediate and lethal. “When you talk about sources and confidential human sources, the sources that operate on both sides of the Southwest border with Mexico, you really have to know what you’re doing when you’re working with them,” Balliet said. “They’re facing threats on both sides.” A mistake made by a source in an ordinary criminal investigation may result in exposure or prosecution. A mistake involving a source embedded near a violent trafficking organization can result in torture or death. That reality changes everything about how the relationship must be handled.

It also reinforces the importance of professionalism. Balliet’s recollection of Serafín Zambada’s arrest is revealing because his first concern was not exploiting the moment for institutional advantage. It was ensuring that the arrest was handled correctly and that DEA’s case was not compromised. “I went down to the port to make sure, number one, that CBP didn’t mess with him and start asking him questions,” he said. “It was DEA’s warrant.” That instinct represents an older and sometimes underappreciated form of professional discipline: knowing when not to act. The fact that an investigator can obtain information does not necessarily mean he should. Protecting another agency’s case, respecting legal boundaries and maintaining the integrity of an investigation can matter more than satisfying immediate curiosity.

That professional restraint is inseparable from the leadership philosophy Balliet developed over twenty five years. He believes leaders should know enough to recognize when their people are doing good work, then trust them enough to let them do it. The best supervisors he encountered were not absent. They were available, engaged and willing to use their authority to remove barriers. But they understood that the people closest to the investigation frequently knew more about the operational details than the people holding the highest titles. “They know they don’t need to be out on surveillance or at a search warrant location,” Balliet explained. Instead, they “cut through all the bureaucratic bullshit, the red tape, all of that sort of stuff, and allow the team to focus on what the objectives are for that particular case.”

This philosophy has obvious implications for source development. Human intelligence requires continuity, patience and institutional support. If leadership constantly reallocates agents according to the newest priority, complex source driven investigations become difficult to sustain. If supervisors judge productivity only through immediate numerical results, agents may have little incentive to spend months cultivating a person who could eventually provide access to a major criminal organization. If handlers fear that a source they spent years developing will suddenly be reassigned without regard for the relationship, they may become less willing to invest in the process. Human intelligence therefore depends not only on the relationship between handler and source but on an institutional culture that understands how long those relationships take to mature.

The most striking thing about Balliet’s story is that after twenty five years, major investigations, leadership assignments and work involving some of the most consequential trafficking environments in the United States, the memories carrying the greatest emotional weight are deeply personal. He remembers September 11 because he was sworn in while the country was under attack. He remembers the Southwest border because of the relentless operational pace and the people who worked beside him. He remembers leaders because they asked what their agents needed instead of demanding credit. He remembers colleagues from other agencies because shared danger made the badge on the other person’s chest less important. And he remembers a confidential source because every Christmas Eve, long after the investigative work had ended, the phone rang.

“Just two dudes saying, hey, I hope you have a good Christmas.”

That may be one of the most important descriptions of human intelligence in the entire conversation. The source relationship begins with utility. The government needs information and the source possesses access. But the most effective relationships often become durable because both people eventually recognize something beyond the transaction. The source recognizes that the handler sees him as a person. The handler recognizes that the source is more complicated than the criminal conduct appearing in a case file. Neither forgets what brought them together. Neither has to pretend they came from the same world. They simply learn enough about one another to establish trust.

For Balliet, that trust was powerful enough to survive nearly two decades. It survived the source relationship. It survived changing assignments. It survived Balliet becoming a senior federal law enforcement leader. It survived Omar no longer having anything professionally useful to offer him. That final point may be the most important. If the relationship exists only while the source is useful, the source will eventually recognize that. Omar continued calling because the relationship had become something else. When he was kidnapped and beaten, he sent Balliet photographs. When Christmas arrived, he called. When he eventually disappeared, Balliet grieved.

“When he disappeared, man, that was tough.”

There is no federal form for that sentence. There is no checkbox for it in a source file. There is no investigative metric that adequately captures what it means for an agent to spend years protecting and working alongside a person and then discover that the person has vanished into a violent environment where his body may never be recovered. Yet that emotional reality is part of human intelligence because human intelligence is exactly what the name suggests. It is human.

Balliet’s career also offers a warning about what happens when institutions forget that reality. Agencies can develop extraordinary technology, sophisticated databases, expansive legal authorities and increasingly powerful analytical tools. None of them eliminate the need for someone who can sit beside a member of a trafficking organization and genuinely ask, “Dude, what was it like?” None can manufacture the trust required for a source to answer honestly. None can replace the judgment necessary to understand when the answer is incomplete, when the person is afraid or when the operational environment has changed. Technology can support human intelligence, but it cannot remove the human relationship from it.

The same lesson applies to leadership. A title cannot create loyalty any more effectively than a badge can create trust. Balliet respected leaders who protected their people, understood the mission and used their authority to create space for investigators to work. He remembers the leader who listened to a major case briefing, determined that the agents knew what they were doing and then asked, “What do you need from me?” That is leadership reduced to its most useful form. It is not about being the smartest person in the room. It is about knowing who possesses the expertise, trusting them and using positional authority to help them succeed.

After a quarter century in federal law enforcement, Balliet has seen the consequences when those principles are honored and when they are ignored. He entered at the beginning of one institutional era and retired as another was emerging. He watched DHS being created from the aftermath of September 11. He experienced the growing pains of ICE and HSI. He worked the Southwest border during periods of extraordinary cartel violence. He participated in complex investigations, worked alongside multiple federal agencies, controlled sources with direct access to major trafficking organizations, moved into senior leadership and eventually served within professional responsibility. That breadth gives his criticism of the current system weight because it is not coming from someone who observed federal law enforcement from a distance. It comes from someone who spent twenty five years inside it.

Yet the lasting lesson from the conversation is not fundamentally about bureaucracy. It is about people. Balliet’s strongest observations return repeatedly to trust, relationships, leadership, humility and the ability to understand someone whose life looks nothing like your own. “You’re not better than them. You’re not superior.” That sentence challenges one of the easiest traps in law enforcement. Authority can become identity. The badge can become evidence, in the mind of the person carrying it, that the person across the table occupies a lower moral category. Once that happens, genuine curiosity disappears. The investigator stops asking why and begins assuming he already knows.

Human intelligence cannot function at its highest level in that environment. A source must believe the handler is capable of hearing uncomfortable truths. The handler must understand that the source may simultaneously be a criminal, a victim, a parent, a trafficker, a witness, a liar, a valuable intelligence asset and a person trying to survive. Those categories are not mutually exclusive. Human beings are complicated enough to occupy several at once.

That complexity is why Balliet’s relationship with Omar matters. It would be easy to reduce Omar to his trafficking connections or romanticize him because of the relationship he developed with Balliet. Neither would be accurate. Balliet does neither. He acknowledges the criminal environment and the choices Omar made while also remembering the person. That ability to hold both truths simultaneously is essential to mature source handling.

It also explains why Omar’s disappearance still matters to him. The investigation had ended. The professional obligation had ended. The relationship had not. “It just personalizes things,” Balliet said. In those four words is something rarely captured in formal discussions of confidential source management. Source work changes the people conducting it because prolonged exposure to another person’s life inevitably does. The handler learns the family. He learns the fears. He learns the contradictions. He sees the person at moments of confidence and vulnerability. He may spend more time talking to that individual than to many ordinary acquaintances. Then one day the case closes, the file moves, the agent transfers or retires, and the institution expects the relationship to become history.

Sometimes it does.

Sometimes the phone rings on Christmas Eve.

Balliet’s experience suggests that the best human intelligence professionals understand the difference between becoming emotionally reckless and remaining human. Professional boundaries are essential. Oversight is essential. Verification is essential. Source validation is essential. Ethical standards are essential. The corruption cases Balliet referenced demonstrate exactly why those safeguards exist. But none of those requirements demand indifference. In fact, a handler who genuinely understands the source may be better positioned to recognize changes in behavior, manipulation, fear or deception than one who maintains a posture of permanent superiority.

The future of human intelligence will inevitably involve more technology. Artificial intelligence will accelerate analysis. Digital surveillance will become more sophisticated. Financial data will become easier to integrate. Communications networks will produce enormous quantities of information. Biometrics, geolocation, commercial data and machine assisted analysis will reveal relationships that investigators once needed months to discover. But those capabilities will not answer every question that matters. They may tell investigators that two people communicated. A source may explain why. They may identify a vehicle crossing the border. A source may explain who ordered it moved. They may expose money traveling through a network. A source may explain what the money represents. They may identify the structure of an organization. A human being inside it may explain where the real power resides.

That is why the fundamentals Balliet describes are unlikely to become obsolete. “It has to be cultivated and crawl, walk, run and trust and communication and all that.” There may be no better description of sustainable source development. Intelligence officers and investigators can accelerate data processing. They cannot accelerate trust indefinitely. A relationship still has to be built. Credibility still has to be demonstrated. The source still has to decide whether the person sitting across from him will protect him, tell him the truth and remain consistent when circumstances become difficult.

Balliet’s career is ultimately a study in those relationships. Between agents and leaders. Between agencies. Between investigators and sources. Between people on opposite sides of the law who discover that understanding each other does not require pretending their differences do not exist. The work is complicated precisely because the people are complicated.

Twenty five years after being unexpectedly sworn in on the morning of September 11, Balliet can look backward across an extraordinary period in federal law enforcement. Agencies were created. Missions expanded. Cartels rose and fractured. Investigative technology changed. Leadership structures changed. Political priorities changed. The border changed. Balliet himself moved from Border Patrol to Customs, through the creation and maturation of HSI, into leadership and professional responsibility before retiring in 2024.

What did not change was the central importance of human beings.

The leader still has to earn the confidence of the agent.

The agent still has to earn the confidence of the source.

The source still has to decide whether the risk is worth taking.

And sometimes, years after the investigation is finished and nobody needs anything from anybody anymore, the phone still rings on Christmas Eve.

For Eric Balliet, that may be the clearest evidence of what trust actually looks like.

In January 2002, only months after the attacks of September 11 changed the course of American history, a Special Forces Operational Detachment quietly entered Afghanistan. Their destination was not a polished forward operating base supported by years of accumulated intelligence. There were no established networks of trusted informants waiting to greet them, no mature intelligence infrastructure supporting their mission, and very little certainty about what awaited them beyond the next ridgeline.

The United States had entered the Global War on Terror with overwhelming military power, but in many ways it was operating in the dark. The men deploying into Afghanistan possessed extraordinary training, discipline, and combat experience, yet they often lacked the one commodity that ultimately determines success in unconventional warfare: reliable human intelligence.

Among those Green Berets was Sgt. Maj. Jeffrey Oates US Army (Retired).

Like many Special Forces soldiers, Oates speaks matter-of-factly about experiences that most Americans could scarcely imagine. His stories are not built around bravado or exaggerated heroics. Instead, they reveal something far more valuable. They show how America’s unconventional warfare soldiers learned to navigate a country they barely understood by relying not simply on technology or firepower, but on people.

Over the course of our conversation, one theme emerged repeatedly. Human intelligence is never simply about information. It is about relationships. Every source, interpreter, village elder, tribal leader, militia fighter, and soldier carries fears, motivations, loyalties, ambitions, biases, and flaws. Understanding those human dimensions can determine whether intelligence saves lives or costs them.

Oates learned that lesson long before becoming an instructor responsible for teaching advanced human intelligence techniques. He learned it in real time while helping America fight during the opening year of the war in Afghanistan.

His journey began years earlier.

Oates entered the Army in 1986. Following basic training, advanced individual training, airborne school, and the Ranger Indoctrination Program, he arrived at the 2nd Ranger Battalion at Fort Lewis, Washington.

The Ranger Regiment was an environment that demanded discipline and precision. Standards mattered because mistakes carried consequences, and for a young soldier it became the foundation upon which the rest of his military career would eventually be built.

He remained with the battalion for nearly three and a half years, leaving only weeks before Operation Just Cause began in Panama.

“I left the Ranger Battalion one month before we invaded Panama,” he recalled. “All my friends, my platoon, everybody that I went to Ranger School with, guys that I went through RIP with, they were all there for the invasion.”

Rather than deploying with his former unit, Oates found himself assigned to an entirely different mission. He was transferred to the Presidio of San Francisco, where he served on the protective detail for the installation’s commanding general.

It was an unusual assignment for a Ranger, but it reinforced a lesson that would become increasingly important throughout his career. Success in elite military organizations is not measured exclusively by what happens in combat. Professionalism, judgment, discipline, adaptability, and the ability to deal effectively with other people matter just as much.

After leaving active duty, Oates attended City College of San Francisco before transferring to Arizona State University and completing his degree. Civilian life, however, did not permanently separate him from the military.

The challenge of Special Forces continued pulling at him, and in 1996 he reenlisted through a Special Forces Reserve unit with one objective in mind: he wanted to earn the Green Beret.

Special Forces is frequently misunderstood outside the military community. Popular culture often portrays Green Berets primarily as commandos conducting raids behind enemy lines. While Special Forces soldiers are certainly capable of direct action, kicking down doors has never adequately described their defining purpose.

Their mission is considerably more complicated because Green Berets are fundamentally designed to work through people.

Rather than simply replacing indigenous forces with American soldiers, they organize, train, advise, and work alongside them. Rather than attempting to understand foreign cultures entirely from command centers thousands of miles away, they are expected to immerse themselves in those cultures. Rather than relying exclusively on superior American technology, they cultivate relationships capable of producing information and influence that satellites, aircraft, and surveillance systems cannot independently provide.

Oates summarized the mission succinctly.

“Our primary mission is to work by, with, and through host nation or indigenous peoples to effectively carry out United States foreign policy.”

Those words capture the essence of unconventional warfare. A Green Beret may certainly need to fight, but he must also be capable of persuading, advising, teaching, negotiating, organizing, observing, and influencing. He must establish credibility with people who may speak another language, practice another religion, come from an entirely different culture, and possess their own reasons for cooperating with the United States.

The ability to build trust where none previously existed can become every bit as important as marksmanship.

Few soldiers could have anticipated just how critical those abilities would become after September 11, 2001.

While attending the Special Forces Qualification Course, Oates was assigned to study Thai. Language training has long been one of the defining elements of Special Forces because communication is inseparable from the mission. An operator cannot effectively influence or understand another population if he has no ability to communicate with it.

Oates spent approximately six months studying Thai before moving on to SERE, the military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape training.

By the time he completed the pipeline, the world had changed.

September 11 had occurred, the United States was at war, and Afghanistan had become the center of America’s military response.

Instead of returning home and resuming life as a reservist, Oates received orders directing him to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, where his company was preparing to deploy.

“The day I graduated SERE School, my sergeant major handed me orders to go to Fort Campbell to link up with my company,” he recalled. “They were on their way to Afghanistan.”

Many of the soldiers he joined had already spent years in Special Forces. His team sergeant was among them, and the man’s résumé bordered on legendary.

He had served in 5th Special Forces Group and attended an early Operator Training Course associated with Delta Force. More remarkably, he had participated in the failed 1980 attempt to rescue the American hostages being held in Iran, the operation remembered through its disastrous staging site at Desert One.

For a relatively new Green Beret entering his first combat deployment, Oates could hardly have asked for a more experienced team sergeant.

“I realized I had landed on a really experienced team.”

The significance of that leadership would become apparent in Afghanistan, where established doctrine frequently collided with an environment the United States was still struggling to understand.

When Americans remember the opening months of the war in Afghanistan, it is easy to imagine an enormous American military machine descending upon the country with a complete understanding of the battlefield.

The reality Oates encountered was dramatically different.

He entered Afghanistan in January 2002 and was initially sent to the area around Khost, near the Pakistani border. At the time, only a relatively small number of American personnel were dispersed across an enormous and extraordinarily difficult country.

Much of the operational environment remained a mystery.

“We didn’t know where the bad guys were, who the bad guys were, what the bad guys looked like,” Oates recalled.

The uncertainty extended to something as fundamental as navigation.

“We had maps that were written in Cyrillic because the United States didn’t even have maps of Afghanistan when I went,” he said. “I still have my map, the Russian maps that we got. They said, ‘Yeah, we know they’re all in Cyrillic, but you’re going to have to use it because it’s all we have.’”

The United States possessed the most technologically advanced military in the world, yet American Special Forces soldiers entering Afghanistan were navigating portions of the country using Soviet-era maps

They adapted.

Even if the writing could not be understood, terrain could be. Mountains, valleys, rivers, roads, and other physical features became reference points. The Green Berets used what they had because there was no alternative.

The maps were not the only indication of how little was known.

The mission itself was remarkably broad.

Military operations are ordinarily built around defined objectives. Intelligence requirements are established, targets identified, enemy capabilities assessed, routes planned, contingencies considered, and commanders briefed.

Oates remembers receiving something considerably less specific.

“I still have the warning order that my team got before we infilled,” he said. “After you go through all this training to learn how to prepare and plan for missions, and you get all these intelligence requirements and things you’re supposed to do, it was pretty shocking.”

The order, as Oates remembers it, essentially directed his detachment to infiltrate Afghanistan and conduct unconventional warfare operations in support of Operation Enduring Freedom.

“That’s all it said,” he recalled. “It didn’t give us a target other than conduct unconventional warfare operations. It kind of left us to decide, ‘Well, what the hell are we supposed to do?’”

The ambiguity says something important about those opening months.

America had entered Afghanistan before America fully understood Afghanistan.

The soldiers on the ground would have to help build that understanding themselves.

That process immediately confronted Oates and his team with perhaps the oldest problem in human intelligence: language.

Special Forces places enormous emphasis on language training, but Oates had been trained in Thai. That did little to help him communicate with a Pashto-speaking Afghan villager near the Pakistani border.

The problem was widespread.

“Almost nobody, even at that time in the groups that were assigned that region of the world, spoke Pashto or Arabic or Dari or any of the other multiple languages that are all over Afghanistan,” Oates explained.

Where he operated, Pashto predominated. There were Urdu speakers, and some men possessed an understanding of Arabic through religious education, but direct communication between the Americans and the people surrounding them remained extremely difficult.

The solution was interpreters.

The solution immediately created another problem.

How do you know whether the interpreter is accurately interpreting?

In the earliest months of the war, finding qualified, reliable, and properly vetted interpreters was difficult. Educational backgrounds varied enormously. Some were highly educated. Others had acquired enough English through circumstances in their lives to make themselves useful to the Americans.

The Special Forces teams nevertheless depended upon them.

“We had three or four interpreters at any given time living and working with us,” Oates recalled. “Even if they were telling us the truth about what was being said, we had no way of figuring out if it was true.”

The problem extended beyond literal translation.

Language contains tone, implication, humor, insult, status, hesitation, and cultural meaning. Body language varies between societies. Social cues that appear obvious to an American may mean something entirely different in rural Afghanistan.

Imagine sitting across from a village elder while he speaks rapidly for several minutes in a language you cannot understand. Perhaps he is discussing the location of an armed group. Perhaps he is explaining a tribal dispute. Perhaps he is identifying a weapons cache. Perhaps he is accusing a rival of cooperating with the Taliban.

Everything you know about that conversation is then compressed into whatever the interpreter tells you.

Was the translation precise?

Was something omitted?

Was something softened?

Did the interpreter alter the elder’s meaning because he feared the Americans might react aggressively?

Did the elder himself have an ulterior motive?

The Americans frequently had no independent way to know.

“Most of the time, it felt like the guy was telling you what he thought we wanted to hear versus what the guy actually said,” Oates recalled.

That did not necessarily mean every interpreter was intentionally deceiving the Americans. The motivations could be considerably more complicated. An interpreter might be trying to prevent a confrontation. He might be protecting a relationship inside his own community. He might fear retaliation. He might have tribal or family loyalties unknown to the Americans.

Or he might simply want to keep his job.

That economic reality became impossible to ignore.

“If we left, everybody, good side, bad side, everybody stopped getting paid,” Oates said. “They had a vested interest in keeping us there and keeping us engaged.”

That created a strange paradox.

The Americans wanted enough intelligence to accomplish their mission. Some of the people providing that intelligence benefited economically from the mission never being completely accomplished.

“They would tell us just enough to keep us there, but not enough to where we could effectively do our mission well enough to end a reason for us to be there.”

For Oates, this became an early education in one of the fundamental realities of HUMINT: information can never be completely separated from the motivation of the person providing it.

A report does not materialize from nowhere. There is always a person somewhere in the chain, and that person has reasons for speaking. Those reasons may involve money, fear, family obligations, personal rivalries, revenge, ideology, status, self-preservation, loyalty, or some combination of them. Understanding those motivations is not peripheral to evaluating intelligence.

It is part of the intelligence itself.

The same problem appeared among the Afghan fighters working alongside the Americans.

Special Forces doctrine teaches soldiers to operate by, with, and through indigenous forces. In Afghanistan, that meant training and working alongside local militia members who understood the terrain, communities, and regional dynamics far better than the Americans ever could.

On paper, the arrangement made perfect sense.

On the ground, every participant had his own interests.

“The people who we supposedly organized and trained and were fighting alongside us, they would do their best to keep us from getting into firefights because they didn’t want us to get hurt,” Oates explained.

At first glance, protecting American soldiers sounds entirely positive. The underlying motivation, however, was more complicated.

“They were afraid if one of us got hurt that America would pull us out and we’d be gone, and then they wouldn’t have a job anymore.”

That could affect operations.

“They would steer us to the wrong target or try to,” Oates said. “They would deny somebody’s a bad guy when we’re right there in front of them so that we wouldn’t get into a firefight.”

Sometimes family relationships complicated matters further. A suspected enemy fighter might also be someone’s cousin, brother, neighbor, or member of the same tribe. Categories that appeared simple on an American intelligence product could become much less clear when viewed through the social structure of an Afghan village.

Eventually, patterns emerged.

The Americans began recognizing when something did not feel right.

But recognizing deception and defeating it are two different problems.

“What tools did we have to fight it?” Oates asked. “We didn’t speak the language. We didn’t understand any of it.”

During that first deployment, the enormous intelligence architecture that would later characterize the war had not yet been constructed.

There were no decades of institutional experience in Afghanistan available to Oates and his teammates. They were learning while operating.

“It was like being in the United States Army Cavalry in the 1840s or 1850s on the frontier,” he said. “You just go out there and you have to figure it out.”

They watched faces.

They watched hands.

They listened to interpreters.

They studied reactions.

They compared stories.

They remembered inconsistencies.

They watched how people behaved when circumstances changed and gradually developed instincts about the environment around them.

“You’re trying to read body language, read smiles, read frowns, read eyes, watch hands and just get a feel for people,” Oates explained. “You can’t do that overnight.”

That last point is particularly important.

Human intelligence takes time.

A satellite can photograph a location almost instantly. A drone can begin watching a vehicle once it arrives overhead. Electronic surveillance can collect enormous amounts of information rapidly.

Trust operates on an entirely different clock.

A person must be observed repeatedly. Statements must be compared with behavior. Promises have to be kept or broken. Information must be tested. The handler must gradually determine what motivates the source and what circumstances might cause that source to lie.

Oates and his team spent nine months in Afghanistan.

“By the time we left, we were probably starting to feel somewhat comfortable,” he said, “but still, we didn’t really have a grasp of who and what we were dealing with.”

There was one indicator that remained relatively easy to understand.

“One of the key parameters we had is if they shoot at us, they’re bad,” Oates said. “So we’re going to go after them.”

Everything short of that could be considerably more ambiguous.

“If they didn’t shoot at us, it was really hard to suss stuff out.”

The uncertainty was compounded by another problem: during that first deployment, Oates and his team did not yet possess mature human source networks.

“We had no sources,” he said. “We had no human sources as of yet. We were trying to start developing stuff.”

More importantly, none of the soldiers on his team had yet received the advanced human intelligence training that would later become central to Oates’ career.

That would change after Afghanistan.

After returning from Afghanistan, Oates attended training where he received advanced instruction centered on sophisticated methods of human intelligence collection and source operations.

He eventually became an instructor.

“That’s what I eventually went to school for when I came back from Afghanistan,” he explained. “Then I became an instructor at the course.”

The experience brought structure to lessons he had already begun learning the difficult way.

Human intelligence was not simply about finding someone willing to provide information.

It involved assessing people, understanding their access, determining their motivations, establishing credibility, testing reliability, assigning tasks, evaluating results, protecting relationships, and constantly questioning whether the information being received reflected reality.

Oates would later apply those principles operationally in Iraq while working alongside intelligence professionals and supporting missions where source reporting could ultimately contribute to operations against high-level targets.

Yet the foundation had already been established in Afghanistan.

Before formal instruction, before sophisticated source networks, and before years of accumulated American experience in the region, Oates had already encountered the fundamental problem that defines human intelligence.

People are complicated.

They lie for complicated reasons and tell the truth for equally complicated reasons. They may cooperate because they believe in the mission, because they need money, because they hate someone, because they fear someone, because they want protection, because they want influence, or because several of those motivations exist simultaneously.

The job of the intelligence professional is not simply to ask questions.

It is to understand the person answering them.

That lesson would eventually become central to Oates’ own philosophy about source handling. When I asked him years later what creates rapport between a handler and another human being, his answer did not begin with sophisticated tradecraft.

It began with something much simpler.

Honesty.

“I think showing them first off that you’re not a liar,” Oates said. “You don’t lie.”

For someone whose career would eventually involve advanced human intelligence operations, the simplicity of the answer is striking.

But that was precisely the point.

The machinery surrounding intelligence can become extraordinarily sophisticated. Collection platforms become more powerful, databases become larger, surveillance becomes more persistent, and analytical systems become more advanced.

The person sitting across the table remains human.

Oates had entered Afghanistan with Soviet maps he could not read, interpreters he could not always verify, militia fighters whose motivations were constantly shifting, and a mission broad enough to require his team to determine much of its own direction.

What he carried out of Afghanistan was an understanding that would remain with him for the rest of his career: the most important intelligence problem is often not obtaining information.

It is understanding the human being who gave it to you.

By the time Jeffrey Oates returned from Afghanistan, he understood that human intelligence was not simply another capability available to Special Forces. It was often the foundation upon which everything else depended.

Afghanistan had exposed him to the extraordinary difficulty of trying to understand people across enormous cultural, linguistic, political, and economic divides. He had watched interpreters become indispensable links between American soldiers and Afghan communities while simultaneously recognizing that every translation passed through another human being with motivations of his own. He had seen local militia fighters cooperate with Americans while also protecting their families, incomes, communities, and personal interests. He had operated in an environment where determining who could be trusted was often considerably more difficult than determining who possessed a weapon.

Those experiences created questions that formal training would later help him answer.

After returning from Afghanistan, Oates attended training where he received specialized instruction in human intelligence collection and source operations. Eventually, he became an instructor himself.

“We did the whole intel cycle,” Oates explained, describing the process of developing and managing human sources.

What he learned reinforced something Afghanistan had already taught him. Successful human intelligence operations are not primarily about convincing someone to talk. They are about understanding why that person is talking in the first place, determining whether the information can be trusted, and building a relationship strong enough to survive circumstances in which both sides may have considerable reasons to distrust one another.

That requires patience.

It also requires observation.

“You have to do your best at first to try and, without them understanding, learn as much as you can about them,” Oates explained. “Not just trivial, superficial things, but who they are.”

Knowing someone’s biography is not the same as knowing the person. A source can provide his name, occupation, family history, political beliefs, and personal background without revealing much about how he will behave when confronted with fear, temptation, pressure, or danger.

Oates wanted his students to understand the difference.

“After knowing them and watching the way they behave or act under a certain set of circumstances, you kind of start to figure out who they are.”

Sometimes that requires intentionally creating circumstances that reveal something about the individual. Other times life provides those opportunities naturally. A meeting goes wrong. A payment is delayed. A source receives bad news. Something unexpected occurs during an operation. The reaction can reveal more than hours of questioning ever could.

“Sometimes life just provides you with a set of circumstances where you get a free observation into, like, a window into them,” Oates said. “You start to build a picture of who they are.”

That picture is never perfect.

Human beings are too complicated for certainty.

But over time, patterns emerge.

A handler begins to understand how someone behaves when nervous, whether he exaggerates, how he responds to disappointment, what he values, what frightens him, and whether his actions correspond with his words. The process is less like conducting an interrogation than gradually learning another human being.

For Oates, one principle became particularly important.

“I think showing them first off that you’re not a liar,” he said. “You don’t lie.”

That does not mean revealing classified information or compromising an operation. Nor does it mean a source is entitled to know everything his handler knows. Operational security remains essential.

It means something more fundamental.

When a handler gives his word, the source needs to believe it.

“Being honest doesn’t mean that you’re trying to be their friend,” Oates explained. “It’s just being honest.”

That includes honesty when the news is unpleasant.

“I will always be honest with you, even if it’s bad news or something you don’t want to hear. I’m going to be honest with you about it.”

That distinction matters enormously in source operations because a confidential source may be placing far more than his reputation at risk. Depending upon the environment, discovery can mean imprisonment, retaliation against family members, torture, or death. A handler who treats that relationship casually may discover very quickly that no amount of money can compensate for the absence of trust.

Oates understood that credibility had to flow in both directions.

The handler needed the source to prove that he was reliable.

The source needed the handler to prove exactly the same thing.

Years later in Iraq, Oates would find himself responsible for a source relationship that demonstrated precisely how difficult that process could become.

After his military deployment to Afghanistan, Oates eventually began working as a civilian contractor in Iraq. He worked first with Triple Canopy and later with NEK Advanced Securities Group, companies staffed heavily by veterans of Special Operations.

Although he was technically a civilian, the work drew directly upon the skills he had developed in Special Forces.

“I got hired basically to do SF stuff, but as a civilian,” he said.

The arrangement also allowed him to continue serving in a reserve military capacity while accepting overseas contracts when he was available. His rotations typically lasted several months before he returned home to spend time with his children.

In Iraq, his work increasingly centered on human intelligence.

During one assignment at a base near Baghdad International Airport, Oates worked alongside a Defense Intelligence Agency case officer operating from a small facility inside the larger military complex.

It was there that he inherited a confidential source.

The word “inherited” is important because source relationships do not transfer cleanly from one handler to another. A source may have spent months developing trust with one person only to discover that the person is rotating home and someone entirely unfamiliar is taking his place.

The paperwork can transfer immediately.

The relationship cannot.

Oates knew almost nothing personally about the man when he assumed responsibility for him.

“I got handed a source already in Iraq once,” he recalled. “He was the cousin of, like, a battalion commander-level type guy for al Qaeda in Iraq.”

That family relationship was precisely what made the source potentially valuable.

The source himself was not believed to be part of the organization, according to Oates, but his familial connection potentially provided access to someone of considerable operational interest.

The previous handler had already been working with him for several months.

“He had been working for the previous guy that I replaced for about four or five months, and then that guy rotated out. I took his job.”

The source remained relatively early in the development process. He had not yet produced enough intelligence to eliminate questions about his reliability, and Oates immediately recognized the central problem.

Was the man genuinely cooperating, or had he simply figured out how to keep Americans interested enough to continue paying him?

“We weren’t 100 percent on if he was on board, if he was just playing us, if he was just trying to make some money and not really do anything that would stick his neck out there,” Oates explained.

The source knew how to maintain interest.

“He was telling me all the right answers a lot of times, and he was giving me just enough to make it feel like he was giving me just enough to make me want to set a next meet.”

Every additional meeting potentially meant another payment.

For a handler, this is where skepticism becomes essential. A source who produces absolutely nothing is relatively easy to evaluate. The more difficult source is the one who continually produces information that appears promising but never becomes actionable.

Oates needed to determine whether the man lacked access, misunderstood his assignments, was deliberately manipulating his handlers, or simply needed more time.

“We had to get beyond just that,” he said. “We had to get to where you’re producing targetable information.”

Rather than immediately assigning him something consequential, Oates began testing him.

The tasks were legitimate, but their immediate operational importance was limited. Oates wanted to see whether the source would actually follow instructions before trusting him with something that could place American personnel or significant military resources at risk.

“I started giving him legitimate tasks, but they weren’t really consequential stuff,” he explained. “They weren’t anything that we were looking to marshal large amounts of force on.”

There was another element to the test that the source did not know about.

Oates could watch him.

Because of the level of the operations his intelligence supported, he had access to surveillance capabilities far beyond what an ordinary Special Forces detachment could typically request.

“I was watching him with drone aircraft that would follow him and film him for me,” Oates said.

That access reflected the potential significance of the intelligence they were trying to develop.

“The stuff that we were gathering, tier one units were hitting the targets if we got targets,” he explained.

A conventional Special Forces team asking for an intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance platform to follow one developing source might never receive it. In Oates’ circumstances, however, the source could potentially provide information relevant to high-level targeting operations.

So Oates designed tests.

He would task the source with going somewhere or interacting with someone during a specific period. Surveillance assets would observe the man’s movements. Later, Oates would meet with him and ask what happened.

The source did not know Oates already possessed part of the answer.

“I’d have this guy go out and do stuff, and then I’d be able to watch him on a TV in a big command center in Iraq,” Oates recalled.

Then came the real test.

Conversation.

“I’d ask him, him not knowing what I knew and what I saw, to just kind of get him to talk and see if he told me what he did and who he talked to and the stuff that happened when he was out there doing this task.”

The surveillance provided Oates with a reference point. The source’s own account provided something technology could not: an opportunity to measure his honesty.

Over several months, the process continued.

Oates assigned tasks.

The source carried them out.

Oates observed what he could.

Then the two men sat together and talked.

Gradually, the uncertainty began to disappear.

“He did all the stuff,” Oates said. “To make a long story short, he kind of validated himself for me.”

The source had passed the test.

What happened next illustrates something unusual about Oates’ approach to source handling.

He eventually told him.

Oates waited until another meeting before revealing what had been happening.

“I kind of let him in,” he recalled. “I said, ‘Remember when I asked you to do this one thing? I watched you the entire way. Did you know that?’”

The source had not known.

“He was like, ‘I had no idea.’”

A handler could easily have kept that information secret. There were obvious operational reasons to do so. Revealing surveillance capabilities can create risks, and in many circumstances such information would never be disclosed.

But for Oates, there was another consideration.

The man had demonstrated honesty.

Oates wanted to reciprocate.

“I wanted to be honest with him,” he said. “I wanted to make it seem like I wasn’t trying to keep anything from him and kind of bring him to me a little bit more, be a little bit more loyal.”

The significance of that moment extends beyond one source operation in Iraq.

The surveillance technology helped Oates determine whether the source was performing his tasks.

It did not create the relationship.

Technology could follow the man down a road. It could record where he traveled. It could potentially establish whom he met.

But it could not make him trust Oates.

That required a conversation.

The revelation also sent the source an unmistakable message. Oates had tested him, and the man had proven himself truthful.

The relationship could now move beyond suspicion toward something considerably more productive.

Unfortunately, the war moved faster than the relationship.

Before Oates could task the source against the higher-level target that originally made him valuable, another operation changed everything.

“By the time I was to the point where I think I could really get him to get me something juicy, the cell or the group that we had him associated with got completely decimated in another operation.”

The source’s relative, the senior figure whose position had provided the man’s potential access, was killed.

Suddenly the intelligence requirement disappeared.

“The battalion commander-level guy that was his cousin just got blown away in another operation,” Oates recalled. “So we’re like, ‘Well, we don’t need this anymore.’”

Oates was instructed to terminate the source relationship.

Not violently.

Administratively.

“Not with extreme prejudice,” he joked, “but just terminate his contract with us.”

That created another delicate human problem.

How do you tell someone who has potentially placed himself and his family in danger by cooperating with the United States that his services are no longer needed?

The termination meeting was not hostile.

It was personal.

The source understood enough about the situation to suspect what was coming. He arranged a large meal and effectively hosted Oates during what would become their final formal meeting.

“He made a point of wanting to have a big meeting and bringing all this food and hosting me basically at my meeting site,” Oates recalled.

The two men ate together.

They drank scotch.

They talked.

Oates explained why the relationship was ending.

“I just was honest with him,” he said. “I’m like, ‘Dude, you don’t have access to what we need and what we’re looking for right now.’”

The distinction was important.

The source was not being terminated because he had failed.

The battlefield had changed.

The target that gave him value was gone, and therefore the access that justified the relationship had largely disappeared with it.

Oates also understood what losing the relationship meant from the source’s perspective. This was not simply the cancellation of a business arrangement. The man had been receiving money. He had assumed risk. He had developed a relationship with Americans whose presence could itself become dangerous if discovered.

“He didn’t have much,” Oates said. “And now he’s worried. He’s like, ‘Is everybody going to find out I was working for you?’”

Oates did not dismiss those fears.

Instead, he explained that the relationship might not necessarily be over forever.

If the source encountered information he believed would interest the Americans, he retained a means of contacting them. Conversely, he needed to continue checking established communication channels in case American intelligence personnel needed him again.

“I basically kind of had to put him into a sleep pattern where we might contact you again, we might never contact you again,” Oates explained.

The meeting ended amicably.

The food apparently did not.

“He fed me all this great Iraqi food that I got really, really sick from,” Oates recalled with a laugh. “It was really good when I ate it, but thirty minutes after the meeting, I was blasting liquid out of my ass.”

It is a crude detail, but also a strangely appropriate reminder of what clandestine human intelligence actually looks like on the ground. Behind the acronyms, intelligence reports, targeting packages, classified systems, and surveillance platforms are people sitting together, eating, talking, laughing, worrying, assessing one another, and occasionally becoming violently ill from dinner.

The relationship had begun as an intelligence requirement.

By the end, it had become something more human.

I asked Oates whether he would recognize the man if, by some bizarre coincidence, he encountered him years later walking somewhere in the United States.

“Oh yeah, I probably would,” he answered.

Would he approach him?

Would he be friendly?

“Yeah. I had no reason not to be friendly with him.”

Oates remembered that the man had a deformity affecting one of his hands or arms, something distinctive enough that he believed he would eventually recognize him even if his face had changed with age.

More importantly, there was no animosity.

“He was just a guy trying to make his way.”

That sentence captures something essential about the relationship between handlers and sources.

The intelligence profession frequently requires people to work intimately with individuals whose lives, decisions, associations, or values may differ radically from their own. A source may be connected to criminals, insurgents, terrorists, corrupt officials, or violent organizations. Understanding that individual as a human being does not require approving of everything surrounding him.

It requires recognizing reality.

People are complicated.

A source can simultaneously be motivated by money and loyalty. He can fear one organization while resenting another. He can cooperate with the United States while remaining deeply suspicious of Americans. He can care about his family, dislike the people around him, want financial security, and possess his own moral boundaries.

Reducing that person to a label makes him easier to categorize.

It does not make him easier to understand.

For Oates, understanding came through the relationship.

“After meeting with the guy so many times and breaking bread with him every time and sharing some scotch with him and learning about his family and learning about him, I would definitely be friendly with him,” he said.

Then Oates articulated the principle beneath it.

“You have to appeal to their humanity.”

That cannot happen if the handler treats the source merely as an intelligence-producing machine.

“You can’t do that if you’re not treating him human like you would any other human,” Oates said. “We’re all human.”

The relationship therefore becomes more than transactional.

Money may open the door. Access may create the intelligence requirement. Operational necessity may bring two people together. None of those things automatically creates trust.

Trust develops when both people begin believing that the other will behave predictably when circumstances become difficult.

For a confidential source, that can mean believing the handler will not casually expose him, abandon him, deceive him unnecessarily, or treat him as disposable.

For the handler, it means believing the source will accurately report what he knows, acknowledge what he does not know, follow instructions, and resist the temptation to manufacture information simply to continue receiving money.

Neither side can ever eliminate risk.

The relationship exists because risk exists.

That is why authenticity matters.

Decades after first entering the Army, Oates embarked on another unexpected chapter.

After 27 years of military service and 13 years working as a firefighter for the City of Seattle, he developed cancer and eventually retired from both careers.

Most people might have considered that enough public service for one lifetime.

Oates did not.

At 59 years old, he entered a law enforcement academy.

“I just became a deputy at 59,” he told me.

The transition forced him to become a student again.

Despite decades in Rangers, Special Forces, intelligence operations, overseas combat environments, and firefighting, Oates refused to assume those experiences automatically made him a police officer.

“I’m the first to say, especially going into law enforcement, I don’t even know what I don’t know,” he said. “I’m not going to pretend to be some kind of sage, wise person because I didn’t know the first thing about law enforcement.”

In fact, Oates offered an observation that might surprise people who assume serving as a Green Beret in combat represents the more complicated profession.

“I think it’s a lot easier to be a Green Beret in Afghanistan driving down a road with rules of engagement that could probably fit on an index card versus being a law enforcement officer in the United States of America.”

The reason is not physical danger.

It is complexity.

An American law enforcement officer operates simultaneously under the United States Constitution, state law, local ordinances, court decisions, departmental policies, and constantly evolving standards governing searches, seizures, arrests, use of force, interviews, evidence, and civil rights.

Every interaction can be recorded.

Every decision can be scrutinized.

“Everybody’s filming you or everybody’s watching you, constantly seeing what you’re going to do,” Oates said. “How you’re going to handle this. What are you going to say to this person? How are you going to treat that lady? It’s crazy hard.”

The humility is notable because Oates entered law enforcement carrying decades of experience that younger deputies simply could not possess.

During the academy, instructors occasionally asked for his perspective on teaching methods because he had previously served as a military instructor. Younger recruits approached him wanting to hear Special Forces stories.

Oates consistently resisted being placed on a pedestal.

“I’m just a regular guy,” he said. “I put my pants on one leg at a time just like you.”

What experience did give him was perspective.

“I kind of come to a situation differently than sometimes some kid who’s only 22 and really hasn’t seen much or done much,” he explained. “I can kind of be a little bit methodical or slower or listen a little bit better than he might or she might.”

That ability to slow down and listen connects directly to the lessons Oates learned in human intelligence.

Whether dealing with an Iraqi source, an Afghan village elder, a frightened civilian, or someone encountered during a domestic law enforcement call, the uniform changes but the human problem remains remarkably similar.

You still have to understand the person standing in front of you.

After completing several months of patrol and field training, Oates prepared to transition into the role that had originally drawn him into law enforcement: serving as a school resource officer.

For someone who had spent years working in some of the world’s most complicated security environments, the assignment might appear comparatively ordinary.

Oates does not see it that way.

Working with children requires patience, judgment, communication, and the ability to build trust before a crisis occurs. Those are not secondary skills. They are precisely the interpersonal abilities that had defined much of his Special Forces career.

His battlefield is different now.

The fundamental mission of building relationships is not.

That perspective became particularly relevant when I asked Oates what today’s military, intelligence, and law enforcement professionals should remember as technology becomes increasingly dominant.

Artificial intelligence can process enormous quantities of information. Persistent surveillance platforms can watch locations for hours or days. Signals intelligence can identify patterns invisible to an individual analyst. Facial recognition, biometric databases, machine learning, satellites, drones, and increasingly sophisticated sensors provide capabilities that would have seemed unimaginable when Oates first entered Afghanistan carrying a Russian map written in Cyrillic.

None of them eliminate the human problem.

“Never forget your own humanity and how flawed of a person we are individually,” Oates said. “And by not forgetting that, remember that the person you’re working with is just as messed up as you.”

The same warning applies to the intelligence itself.

Every report originated somewhere.

Someone saw something.

Someone heard something.

Someone interpreted something.

Someone translated something.

Someone entered something into a system.

Someone analyzed it.

Someone decided what mattered.

Technology may accelerate that process dramatically, but technology does not erase the human assumptions embedded within it.

Oates learned that lesson in spectacular fashion in Afghanistan.

The incident began with an American helicopter flying over a series of caves.

It ended with a Special Forces team sitting inside a mission briefing and slowly realizing that the supposedly dangerous al Qaeda encampment they were being ordered to attack was actually their own base.

The United States military had developed intelligence identifying an enemy position.

There was only one problem.

The enemy position was Firebase Rocky, home to Jeffrey Oates and his fellow Green Berets.

The Intelligence Failure That Nearly Sent Green Berets Against Themselves

Firebase Rocky did not begin as a firebase. It began as a problem Jeffrey Oates and his Special Forces team needed to solve. They had been directed to move farther from Khost and establish themselves closer to the Pakistani border, where they could operate in territory that remained difficult to govern, difficult to understand, and deeply connected to the movement of fighters and supplies across the region.

The team needed somewhere to live and operate, but in Afghanistan in 2002 that meant considerably more than finding a house with enough rooms. They needed a defensible position capable of supporting the Green Berets, their vehicles, communications equipment, weapons, supplies, and the large contingent of Afghan militia fighters working alongside them. “We had about 250 or 300 militia, Afghan militia guys that we had trained and hired that were basically our force-multiplying force that would go with us,” Oates explained.

For weeks, the team drove through the region looking for a suitable location. They considered houses belonging to Afghan families, village elders, warlords, and other local figures, but nothing provided what they needed. Then one evening, circumstances made the decision for them. The sun was beginning to disappear, they were too far from their existing camp to comfortably return before dark, and the team decided to stop for the night in a massive wadi near the area where they wanted to operate.

One of their interpreters told them about caves nearby. The Green Berets went to investigate and discovered something extraordinary. Dozens of caves had been dug into the walls of the wadi at different elevations. Some were near the floor, others were 15 or 20 feet above it, and still others sat closer to the top. Their sizes varied enormously, from small rooms to chambers Oates remembered as being comparable to a high school auditorium.

“We went over and looked at it, and all of us kind of looked at each other like, holy shit, we could live here.”

The following morning, they explored the area more carefully. What had initially been an improvised campsite suddenly looked like the answer to the problem they had spent weeks trying to solve. The caves offered concealment, defensibility, room for equipment, and enough surrounding terrain to accommodate the Afghan militia force. Instead of leasing a house, the team decided to transform the caves into an operational base.

Ironically, Oates and his teammates would later learn that they were hardly the first fighters to recognize the military value of those caves.

According to nearby locals, the caves had previously been used by the mujahideen during their fight against the Soviet Union in the 1980s. They had also, the locals told the Americans, been used briefly by Al-Qaeda before Oates and his team arrived in the area.

Now they were becoming an American Special Forces base.

They called it Firebase Rocky.

“We turned these caves into an operating, functioning firebase,” Oates recalled. “We’d leave from the caves, we’d leave guys back to defend it, we’d go out on an operation, we’d come back to the cave, we’d refit and then go back out.”

For roughly six months, the caves became home. By conventional American military standards, Firebase Rocky was primitive, but it functioned. The team established security, communications, living areas, storage, and the infrastructure necessary to conduct missions from the site. Their vehicles included Toyota Hiluxes, Toyota Tacomas, Kawasaki four-wheelers, and several Afghan transport vehicles universally recognizable throughout the region by their elaborate decorations.

The Americans called them jingle trucks.

“They decorated them with all this stuff, and every time they drove anywhere it just jingled because everything was banging together,” Oates said. “You could hear them from a click away. You’d hear it and be like, ‘Oh, here comes the jingle truck.’”

The location must have been an extraordinary sight. There were American Green Berets operating from caves in a remote Afghan wadi, hundreds of armed local militia members positioned around them, military equipment, pickup trucks, weapons, supplies, and decorated Afghan transport vehicles constantly moving through the position. To the Americans living there, it was simply their team house and operating base. To someone observing it without context, however, it could look like something very different.

That distinction would nearly have catastrophic consequences.

The Helicopters Over Firebase Rocky

One day, Oates was at Firebase Rocky when American helicopters appeared overhead. He remembers them flying low along the wadi, using the terrain almost as someone might follow a river.

“They were following this wadi, flying up at about probably 100, 150 feet above the ground,” he recalled.

The helicopters passed directly over the position. Soldiers were sitting near the rear ramp with weapons, looking down at the people and vehicles below. The Green Berets at Firebase Rocky did what soldiers often do when friendly aircraft pass overhead: they waved. The helicopters continued along the wadi and disappeared.

There was no firefight, no emergency and no obvious reason to think much more about the encounter. Firebase Rocky was an established American position. The team’s command knew where they were operating, and the men had been living there for months.

A week or two later, however, Oates and several members of his team were summoned back to Chapman Air Base near Khost. Their battalion commander was coming down, and they were told to prepare for a mission briefing. Part of the team remained behind to secure Firebase Rocky while Oates, his team leader, his team sergeant, and several others traveled to the briefing.

What they heard sounded serious.

American intelligence had apparently identified an al Qaeda encampment containing a significant enemy force.

“They start briefing us on this mission,” Oates recalled. “We’re going to go on this direct action mission to hit what they believe is an al Qaeda camp with 100 to 200 al Qaeda soldiers in it.”

The intelligence described armed men, numerous vehicles, heavy machine guns, small arms and potentially other weapons. From the briefing, it sounded exactly like the kind of target American Special Forces had been sent to Afghanistan to find. Somewhere in the region was apparently a substantial concentration of al Qaeda fighters, and Oates’ team was being prepared to attack it.

Then the briefing moved to the location.

Oates looked at the map.

Something was wrong.

He was sitting next to his team sergeant, Doug.

“I remember sitting next to my team sergeant and I’m like thinking, ‘Doug, that looks a lot like our camp.’”

His team sergeant and team leader were looking at it.

The terrain looked familiar.

They asked for confirmation on the grid coordinates.

The coordinates were provided, and the men plotted them on their own map.

The answer was unmistakable.

The supposed al Qaeda camp containing 100 to 200 armed enemy fighters was not an al Qaeda camp at all.

It was Firebase Rocky.

The United States military was preparing to send Jeffrey Oates and his Special Forces team on a direct action mission against themselves.

Oates turned to his team sergeant.

“I said, ‘We were right, Doug. They were going to send us on a mission to hit ourselves.’”

His team sergeant confirmed it.

“Yeah, they were.”

The realization was no longer simply a strange intelligence discrepancy. It was potentially deadly.

Oates’ team sergeant was not a young NCO encountering his first questionable briefing. He had served at the highest levels of American Special Operations, had been involved with Delta Force in its earliest years, and had survived Desert One. According to Oates, when this man spoke, people listened regardless of rank.

During a break in the briefing, the team sergeant took the commander into another room. Oates never heard the conversation and could only imagine how directly the situation was explained.

When they returned, the decision had been made.

The operation was canceled.

“They came back and said, ‘We’re going to discontinue this. This mission’s been scrubbed.’”

The Green Berets had just watched an intelligence process come extraordinarily close to turning their own firebase into an American target.

When Intelligence Becomes a Target

The story is funny only because someone caught the mistake.

The alternative scenarios are considerably less amusing. Had the target package been handed to another Special Forces team, Rangers, or another assault element unfamiliar with Firebase Rocky, American forces could have launched a nighttime attack against Green Berets and the Afghan militia fighting alongside them. The defenders, believing themselves under attack by an enemy force, could have returned fire. A misidentified position could have become a lethal friendly-fire engagement before either side understood what was happening.

There was an even worse possibility.

A ground force did not necessarily have to be sent at all.

“They could have just sent a couple of fast movers and dropped a couple JDAMs onto our position in the middle of the night,” Oates said. “Who knows what would have happened then?”

The incident stayed with him because the underlying intelligence had not necessarily begun with a lie or a malfunctioning sensor.

Someone had observed something real.

American personnel flying over the wadi had seen a remote fortified position occupied by a large number of armed men, vehicles and weapons. Without additional context, it looked suspicious.

According to Oates, personnel aboard the aircraft had apparently produced a spot report describing what they had observed. Somewhere between that initial observation and the eventual mission briefing, the information acquired greater certainty. A remote position with armed men became a suspected enemy encampment, the suspected encampment became an al Qaeda camp, and the al Qaeda camp eventually became a target worthy of a direct action mission.

The problem was not necessarily the original observation.

The problem was what happened afterward.

“Nobody checked it like, ‘What is in there? Do we have anything there? Do we know what’s there?’” Oates said. “They just ran with it.”

A basic check against friendly positions should have revealed the answer immediately. Oates and his team had not arrived at the caves the previous afternoon. They had been operating from Firebase Rocky for months, and their command structure knew where they were located.

“Everybody knew where we were,” he said. “We’d been there for like four months.”

Somewhere in the intelligence process, however, context disappeared.

The system had correctly observed armed men.

It had correctly observed vehicles.

It had correctly observed a fortified position.

It had correctly observed what looked like a substantial fighting force.

The system had simply gotten the most important fact wrong.

They were Americans and their allies.

Observation Is Not Understanding

The Firebase Rocky incident offers a remarkable illustration of the difference between collection and understanding. A sensor, aircraft, drone, satellite or human observer can accurately report what is physically visible while still reaching a disastrously incorrect conclusion about what that information means.

A drone may show a vehicle repeatedly stopping outside a particular building, but that does not independently establish why the driver is going there. Satellite imagery may show armed men moving through a compound, but the presence of weapons does not automatically establish their affiliation. Signals intelligence may demonstrate that two individuals communicate regularly, but the existence of communication does not necessarily explain the nature of their relationship.

Collection produces pieces of reality.

Intelligence requires those pieces to be interpreted, corroborated and placed into context.

The farther information travels from the original environment, the easier it can become for assumptions to harden into conclusions.

Oates had witnessed that process almost produce a disaster.

“Whatever you end up with, what you think is actionable or analyzed and produced intelligence, you’ve got to remember the source that it came from,” he said.

The source does not always have to be a confidential informant sitting across a table from a handler. It can be a pilot, an imagery analyst, a soldier filing a spot report, an interpreter translating a conversation, a signals intelligence specialist reviewing communications, or an analyst attempting to assemble dozens of fragmented reports into a coherent picture.

Every person in that chain brings assumptions, experience, biases, limitations and incomplete information. A mistake at one level can be repeated by the next, and once enough people accept an assumption, it can begin to acquire the appearance of established fact.

That is why Oates became skeptical of intelligence simply because it appeared polished or authoritative.

“Nothing I ever received, whether it was from a source or whether it came back down from the apparatus that I fed the data into, was ever just automatically perfect,” he explained.

His description of finished intelligence was deliberately provocative. He had seen reports contain enough correct information to appear convincing while simultaneously containing enough incorrect interpretation to send operators in the wrong direction.

“It was almost always wrong or had so many variations of wrong and so many variations of right that it was hard to determine if it was worth anything at all.”

Oates was not arguing that intelligence is useless. His own career demonstrates precisely the opposite. He spent years collecting it, developing human sources, teaching others how to obtain it, and supporting operations dependent upon it.

His point was that intelligence should never be confused with certainty.

Firebase Rocky was the perfect example.

Every physical observation could be accurate while the final conclusion remained catastrophically wrong.

The Value of Being There

For Oates, the experience reinforced the importance of proximity to the environment being analyzed. He repeatedly returned during our conversation to the value of actually being on the ground, interacting with people and seeing circumstances firsthand.

“What did matter was when we were on the ground being there and working with people,” he said. “At that moment, that was the only time you had any true intelligence.”

He was not suggesting that satellites, signals intelligence, aerial surveillance or intelligence analysts were unnecessary. Each capability provides information that a Green Beret standing in a village could never independently obtain. The danger appears when those tools create an illusion that physical observation and contextual understanding are the same thing.

The intelligence system knew something existed inside the wadi.

Oates knew what it was because he slept there.

That distinction saved lives.

When the target appeared on the briefing map, he did not need sophisticated analysis to recognize it. He knew the terrain. He knew the location. He knew the vehicles. He knew the armed men supposedly occupying the enemy camp because they were his own militia fighters.

The most valuable intelligence in that room was not a classified report.

It was the experience of the people who had actually been there.

From Afghanistan to the Southern Philippines

Oates’ time in Afghanistan was only one chapter of a military career that ultimately spanned 27 years. He later deployed with Special Forces to the southern Philippines, where American forces were working to disrupt militant networks associated with groups such as Abu Sayyaf and Jemaah Islamiyah.

The environment was dramatically different from Afghanistan, but many of the underlying problems remained familiar. The Americans again had to work through local forces, understand relationships between communities, evaluate information coming from people with their own motivations, and operate inside political and cultural structures that outsiders could easily misunderstand.

Oates remembers the southern Philippines as considerably more violent than many people might expect.

There was shooting and death comparable to his trips to Iraq.

The mission also reinforced the central concept underlying Special Forces. Green Berets rarely succeed simply because they possess superior weapons. Their real advantage often comes from the ability to work with another country’s forces, understand local dynamics and help indigenous partners accomplish objectives that American troops could not sustainably achieve alone.

It is the human component of unconventional warfare, and Oates had spent much of his career learning how difficult that component could be.

Returning to War as a Civilian

Oates also spent multiple rotations in Iraq as a civilian contractor, first with Triple Canopy and later with NEK Advanced Securities Group. Although he was no longer wearing an Army uniform during those assignments, the work drew directly upon his Special Forces experience and advanced human intelligence training.

“I got hired basically to do SF stuff, but as a civilian,” he explained.

The companies employing him were heavily populated by former Special Operations personnel, which allowed experienced operators to continue supporting sensitive missions outside the conventional active-duty structure. For Oates, the arrangement also allowed him to return home between rotations and spend time with his children.

His Iraq work eventually placed him alongside intelligence professionals developing human sources capable of producing information for extremely high-level operations. It was there that he inherited the Iraqi source discussed earlier, a man whose family relationship potentially provided access to a senior figure associated with al Qaeda in Iraq.

That experience reinforced the lesson Firebase Rocky had already taught him.

Information is never enough on its own.

It has to be verified, tested and understood.

With the Iraqi source, Oates had access to sophisticated surveillance assets capable of watching the man while he completed assigned tasks. The technology allowed Oates to confirm where the source traveled and whether he did what he claimed. Yet the surveillance itself did not tell Oates everything he needed to know. He still had to sit across from the man afterward, listen to his account, compare the story against what had been observed, and gradually determine whether the source could be trusted.

The technology verified behavior.

The relationship revealed the person.

That distinction would remain important long after Oates left the battlefield.

Starting Over at 59

After 27 years in the Army, Oates spent another 13 years serving as a firefighter for the City of Seattle. Cancer eventually forced him into retirement, ending another demanding career that had placed service at the center of his adult life.

Most people would have considered that enough.

Oates started over.

At 59 years old, he entered a law enforcement academy and became a deputy.

“I just became a deputy at 59,” he told me.

What is particularly striking is not that a former Green Beret entered law enforcement at that age. It is how he approached the transition. Despite decades in Rangers, Special Forces, Afghanistan, Iraq, the Philippines, human intelligence operations and firefighting, Oates refused to assume that those experiences automatically made him competent at police work.

“I’m the first to say, especially going into law enforcement, I don’t even know what I don’t know,” he explained. “I’m not going to pretend to be some kind of sage, wise person because I didn’t know the first thing about law enforcement.”

That humility reflects the same philosophy that kept him skeptical of intelligence assessments. Experience matters, but believing your experience makes you incapable of being wrong can become dangerous.

Oates even offered an observation that may surprise people who assume serving as a Green Beret in Afghanistan represents the more complicated profession.

“I think it’s a lot easier to be a Green Beret in Afghanistan driving down a road with rules of engagement that could probably fit on an index card versus being a law enforcement officer in the United States of America.”

He was referring not to physical danger, but to the extraordinary legal and social complexity of domestic policing. An American deputy operates under the Constitution, state law, court precedent, local ordinances, departmental policies and constantly evolving standards governing searches, seizures, arrests, evidence, interviews and use of force. At the same time, nearly every interaction can be recorded and scrutinized afterward.

“Everybody’s filming you or everybody’s watching you, constantly seeing what you’re going to do, how you’re going to handle this, what you’re going to say to this person, how you’re going to treat that lady,” Oates said. “It’s crazy hard.”

His years in Special Forces nevertheless gave him something valuable.

They taught him how to slow situations down, observe people and listen before deciding what something meant.

“I kind of come to a situation differently than sometimes some kid who’s only 22 and really hasn’t seen much or done much,” he explained. “I can kind of be a little bit methodical or slower or listen a little bit better than he might or she might.”

That may be one of the most transferable lessons from human intelligence to law enforcement. A young operator may believe decisive action solves every problem. Experience often teaches the opposite.

Sometimes the most effective person in the room is the one willing to listen long enough to understand what is actually happening.

A Green Beret in a School Hallway

After completing months of patrol and field training, Oates prepared for the assignment that had originally attracted him to law enforcement: becoming a school resource officer.

The transition from Afghanistan and Iraq to an American school hallway might appear enormous, but Oates’ career suggests more continuity than one might initially expect. An effective school resource officer cannot simply appear when a student is in trouble and expect immediate trust. Relationships have to exist before the crisis occurs. Students need to know the deputy, teachers need to trust him, parents need to understand his role, and the officer needs enough familiarity with the community to recognize when something has changed.

Those are fundamentally human intelligence principles. The objective is different, but the interpersonal foundation is remarkably similar. Credibility is accumulated through repeated interactions, and trust established before a crisis becomes extraordinarily valuable when something goes wrong.

Oates had spent decades learning that relationships cannot be improvised at the moment they become necessary. The Iraqi source who trusted him did so because of months of meetings, tasks, conversations and shared experiences. Afghan militia fighters learned to work with Americans through repeated contact. Even interpreters whose reliability could sometimes be questioned became more understandable as the Green Berets spent time observing them.

The uniform had changed, but people had not.

The Human Being Behind the Intelligence

Near the end of our conversation, I asked Oates what he believes today’s military, intelligence and law enforcement professionals should carry forward as their professions become increasingly dependent upon technology.

The question is becoming more urgent. Artificial intelligence can analyze enormous datasets at speeds no human analyst could approach. Drones can maintain persistent surveillance over locations for hours. Biometric systems can identify individuals across borders, machine learning can detect patterns buried inside massive collections of information, satellites can observe geographic changes from orbit, and signals intelligence can reveal networks invisible to anyone standing on the ground.

Those capabilities are extraordinary, and they will continue becoming more powerful.

Oates’ concern is not that technology should be rejected.

It is that professionals may forget the human limitations that remain embedded inside every system.

“The biggest thing is never forgetting your own humanity and how flawed of a person we are individually,” he said. “And by not forgetting that, remember that the person you’re working with is just as fucked up as you.”

Every intelligence report originated somewhere. Someone saw something, heard something, translated something, photographed something, interpreted something or told someone something. Another person then entered that information into a system, someone else analyzed it, and another person may eventually decide whether men with rifles should be sent somewhere because of it.

Technology can accelerate that chain enormously, but it cannot remove human assumptions from it.

A computer can identify patterns without necessarily understanding motive. A drone can follow a man without knowing whether he is loyal, frightened, dishonest, desperate, coerced or simply trying to feed his family. A database can connect two names without understanding the emotional history between them, and a satellite can show 200 armed men occupying caves without knowing that those men are actually the American-backed force everyone is looking for.

Firebase Rocky taught Oates that lesson in the most dramatic way imaginable.

The intelligence system saw a fortified position occupied by armed men and vehicles. It interpreted those observations, produced an assessment and moved toward an operation. Everything looked convincing until the men being ordered to attack the target looked at the map and recognized their own home.

That is the enduring warning contained in Jeffrey Oates’ story.

The future of intelligence will contain more artificial intelligence, more automation, more sensors, more surveillance and faster analytical systems than anything his generation possessed when it entered Afghanistan carrying Soviet maps written in Cyrillic. Those tools will undoubtedly save lives and produce extraordinary capabilities, but none of them eliminates the requirement for skepticism, corroboration, context and human judgment.

Sometimes the difference between intelligence and disaster is not another satellite, another drone or another algorithm.

Sometimes it is an experienced human being who knows the terrain, understands the people, recognizes that something does not make sense, and is willing to challenge what everyone else in the room has already accepted.

At Firebase Rocky, that difference may have saved an entire Special Forces team.

When Oates, his team sergeant and his team leader looked at the target they had been ordered to attack, the most important intelligence produced that day came down to one extraordinarily simple realization:

“That’s us.”

You have probably driven past a Flock camera without realizing it. They can appear along roads, at entrances to neighborhoods, near businesses and parking lots, and in areas where police departments or private property owners want greater awareness of vehicles entering or leaving. To an ordinary driver, there may be nothing particularly remarkable about the device. It can look like just another piece of roadside infrastructure in a country already saturated with traffic cameras, security cameras and sensors.

But a Flock camera is not simply another camera recording hours of video in case someone eventually decides to watch it. Flock Safety is best known for automated license plate recognition technology, commonly called ALPR or LPR, that can transform the passage of a vehicle into searchable information. The system can capture a license plate, associate it with a particular location and time, and identify characteristics of the vehicle itself. Instead of investigators having to manually watch hours of surveillance footage, they can potentially search a database for vehicles that meet particular criteria.

That difference may sound technical, but it is central to the controversy now surrounding Flock. A conventional security camera primarily records what happened in front of it. An automated license plate reader can help turn what happened in front of it into structured data that can later be queried. When many of those cameras operate across different locations, the result is something much more powerful than any individual camera mounted beside a road.

It is, in effect, a searchable memory of where vehicles have been observed.

What Exactly Is a Flock Camera?

Flock Safety is an American technology company that sells surveillance and public-safety systems to law-enforcement agencies, businesses, neighborhoods and other customers. Among its most recognizable products are its Falcon automated license plate recognition cameras. These devices are designed primarily to identify vehicles rather than the faces of the people inside them.

When a vehicle passes one of these cameras, the system can capture an image of the vehicle and attempt to read its license plate. The observation can then be associated with information including the date, time and location of the camera. Flock also advertises the ability to identify vehicle characteristics, allowing investigators to search for more than a perfectly known license plate.

That matters because police investigations rarely begin with perfect information. A witness to a robbery might remember seeing a dark pickup truck but only recall two characters from its license plate. Someone might remember that a suspicious vehicle was a white SUV with a roof rack. A surveillance recording might show a vehicle clearly enough to determine its general appearance while leaving the license plate unreadable.

Historically, investigators faced an enormous amount of manual work in situations like these. Detectives could canvass businesses, collect security recordings, interview witnesses and have officers watch hours of footage looking for a particular vehicle. Automated vehicle-recognition technology can dramatically reduce that workload by making characteristics of vehicles searchable.

This is why Flock should not be thought of simply as a collection of cameras. The physical camera is merely the point at which information enters a much larger technological system. The database, search tools, alerts, retention rules, sharing arrangements and people authorized to access that information are what make the technology powerful.

What Happens When Your Car Passes One?

Imagine leaving home one morning and driving to work. Several miles into the trip, your vehicle passes an automated license plate reader. The system captures the plate, photographs the vehicle and associates that observation with the camera’s location and a timestamp. You continue driving and eventually pass another camera operated by another participating organization or agency.

Neither observation necessarily means anyone is actively watching you. There may be no police officer sitting in a room looking at a live feed and there may be absolutely no reason for anyone to care that your vehicle passed either location. For the overwhelming majority of ordinary drivers, the observation may simply enter the system and eventually disappear according to the applicable retention policy without ever becoming relevant to an investigation.

The significance appears when someone later has a legitimate reason, and sufficient access, to search.

Suppose investigators are looking for a particular vehicle after a serious crime. Instead of beginning only with officers physically searching streets, detectives may be able to query available ALPR records to determine whether the vehicle was recently observed. If it appeared in front of a camera, investigators potentially gain a location and a time from which to continue their investigation.

The system can therefore transform a fleeting event into retrievable information. A vehicle that passed through an intersection yesterday is no longer necessarily something that must be reconstructed entirely from human memory, eyewitnesses or whatever conventional security footage investigators happen to locate.

The observation may already have been recorded.

A Search Engine for Vehicles

One useful way to understand the concept is to think about the difference between a library full of books and a modern internet search engine. Both contain information, but the ability to rapidly search, categorize and retrieve that information fundamentally changes its usefulness.

The same principle applies to surveillance footage.

A city could theoretically have thousands of conventional security cameras recording continuously. That would create an enormous amount of footage, but finding one particular black pickup truck could still require investigators to determine which cameras mattered and then manually review recordings from each location.

Automated license plate recognition changes the problem from one of simply collecting images to one of organizing and searching information.

If investigators possess a complete license plate, the utility is obvious. They can search for observations associated with that plate within the databases and jurisdictions to which they have authorized access. But vehicle-recognition technology can also become useful when investigators possess less complete information because Flock advertises search capabilities involving characteristics such as vehicle type, make, color and other identifying features.

Imagine investigators know that a dark Ford pickup was observed near a burglary at approximately 2:15 in the morning. They may be able to narrow the universe of vehicles detected in the relevant area and timeframe rather than manually reviewing every vehicle that passed every available camera.

This is one reason law-enforcement agencies find the technology so attractive. It does not eliminate detective work. It potentially gives detectives a remarkably powerful new starting point.

The Network Matters More Than the Camera

A single license plate reader is relatively easy to understand. If one camera sits at the entrance to a parking lot, it can potentially tell an authorized user that a particular vehicle entered or exited that location at a particular time. Its usefulness is geographically limited by where that camera sits.

Now imagine another camera several miles away, another in the neighboring community, another near a major road and thousands more distributed across different parts of the country. Depending on how the systems are configured and what information agencies agree to share, observations that were once isolated can become part of a much larger investigative ecosystem.

That is where the debate changes.

The issue is no longer simply whether police should be allowed to photograph a license plate visible on a public roadway. Police officers have observed license plates for generations. The more difficult question is what happens when technology makes large numbers of those observations searchable, rapidly retrievable and potentially shareable across jurisdictional boundaries.

Scale changes the nature of information.

If a police officer standing at an intersection sees your vehicle at 9:03 on a Tuesday morning, that observation probably tells the officer almost nothing about you. But if technology repeatedly observes the same vehicle at numerous locations, those individually unremarkable observations can potentially begin revealing patterns.

Where does the vehicle normally appear in the morning? Where is it regularly observed at night? Does it frequently travel between two locations? Was it near several places investigators consider relevant to a particular case?

The computer does not need to know what any of those patterns mean. Human investigators can make those connections themselves.

Flock Is Not Simply Facial Recognition

This distinction is important because discussions about surveillance technology frequently combine several very different technologies under one label. Flock says its standard ALPR technology does not use facial recognition to identify the occupants of vehicles. The primary object being analyzed is the vehicle and its license plate.

That does not make the privacy debate disappear.

A vehicle can function as a highly useful proxy for the movements of its regular driver. If investigators know that a particular person regularly drives a particular car, knowing where that vehicle has been observed may provide information about that person’s movements even if the camera never identifies the person’s face.

That creates an important conceptual distinction. The system does not necessarily need to recognize Benjamin Smith walking down a sidewalk to provide investigators with useful location information about Benjamin Smith. If investigators know Smith normally drives a particular Toyota Camry, observations of that Camry may become relevant to determining where he has traveled.

It is therefore more accurate to describe the privacy concern as vehicle-location intelligence rather than simply facial surveillance.

Flock Can Also Generate Alerts

The system’s usefulness is not limited to investigators searching historical observations after a crime has occurred. Automated license plate recognition can also be used to alert law enforcement when certain vehicles are detected.

Consider a stolen vehicle. Traditionally, officers might receive the license plate and description during a briefing or over police radio and then remain alert for it while patrolling. Whether the vehicle was discovered could depend heavily on whether an officer happened to encounter it.

An automated system changes those odds.

If a properly flagged vehicle passes an ALPR camera, the system can potentially alert law enforcement that the vehicle was observed at a particular location. Officers now have information that may allow them to respond much more quickly.

The public-safety implications become even clearer in situations involving missing or endangered people. If police are searching for a vehicle associated with an Amber Alert, kidnapping or other emergency, rapidly identifying where that vehicle has recently appeared can save investigators enormous amounts of time.

In these circumstances, the technology can look less like an Orwellian surveillance apparatus and more like an extraordinarily effective public-safety tool. A machine can continuously look for something that thousands of human officers could never simultaneously watch for.

That is the strongest argument in Flock’s favor, and it deserves to be taken seriously.

Why Police Departments Want It

Police departments face an information problem that is difficult for outsiders to appreciate. Cities contain thousands or millions of vehicles, countless intersections and enormous amounts of private and public surveillance footage. After a serious crime, investigators frequently know that useful information exists somewhere but finding it can consume precious hours or days.

A witness might report seeing a suspicious car. A gas station might have video. Another business three blocks away might have captured the same vehicle. A traffic camera might have recorded it ten minutes later. Traditionally, connecting those observations can require officers to physically locate cameras, request recordings, determine relevant timeframes and manually examine footage.

ALPR technology can automate a portion of that process.

For a detective investigating a homicide, kidnapping, robbery or series of burglaries, that capability can be enormously valuable. It can help establish timelines, identify vehicles that deserve further investigation and generate leads that otherwise might never have been discovered.

There is also an important distinction between an investigative lead and evidence of guilt. The fact that a vehicle was observed somewhere does not establish that its owner committed a crime. It establishes an observation that investigators can compare with other evidence.

Good investigators understand that difference.

The danger emerges when people do not.

Why People Are So Concerned

The criticism of Flock is not primarily based on the proposition that police should never be allowed to see a license plate. License plates are intentionally displayed in public and have been used by law enforcement for generations.

The concern is about aggregation.

Human memory is naturally limited. If you drive through a town today, dozens of people might see your vehicle, but most will forget it almost immediately. A police officer might notice your license plate while stopped beside you at an intersection, but unless there is some reason to record it, that observation will probably disappear with thousands of others made during the officer’s shift.

Databases do not forget in the same way.

Once an observation becomes structured data, it can potentially be searched, compared and connected with other observations for however long the applicable system retains it. What would otherwise have been a momentary public observation becomes part of a temporary historical record.

Privacy advocates sometimes describe this as a mosaic effect. One piece of information may reveal almost nothing, while many individually harmless pieces can create a surprisingly detailed picture.

Suppose a vehicle is observed near a particular house every night, near another address every weekday morning, at a medical facility every Wednesday afternoon and at another location every Sunday. None of those observations necessarily reveals anything sensitive by itself. Taken together, however, patterns can emerge from which human beings may draw conclusions.

That is fundamentally different from a police officer occasionally seeing a car on the road.

The Most Important Feature May Be Retrospective Search

There is another characteristic of systems like Flock that deserves more attention: police do not necessarily have to decide that someone is interesting before the vehicle is observed.

Traditional physical surveillance generally begins after investigators identify a person or place worth watching. Officers decide to follow a suspect, establish surveillance outside a building or obtain authorization for another investigative technique. The decision to investigate comes first and the observations follow.

Automated systems can partially reverse that sequence.

The camera collects an observation because the vehicle passed it. Days later, something happens that makes the vehicle relevant. Investigators can then potentially return to information that was collected before anyone knew it would matter.

This is extraordinarily useful in criminal investigations.

Imagine a homicide occurs Monday and detectives identify a suspect’s vehicle Wednesday. Investigators cannot travel backward in time and station an officer at an intersection the suspect may have passed Monday night. But if an automated system recorded the vehicle, investigators may have a digital observation from before they even knew which car they were looking for.

That is an incredible investigative capability.

It is also precisely why retention rules matter so much.

The Difference Between Seven Days, Thirty Days and Forever

How long information remains searchable fundamentally affects the power of a surveillance system. A database containing several days of observations can help investigators reconstruct recent events. A database containing months or years of observations could theoretically reveal far more extensive patterns.

This is why seemingly mundane questions about data-retention policies are actually central to the Flock debate.

How long should an observation remain available? Who decides? Can individual agencies establish longer periods? Under what circumstances should information be preserved because it has become evidence in an investigation? What happens when another agency requests access?

These are governance questions, not engineering questions.

The technology tells us what is possible.

Law and policy determine what is permissible.

Then Comes the Human Being

This is where the story becomes especially relevant to the study of intelligence and leadership.

Every powerful intelligence system eventually encounters the same vulnerability: the person authorized to use it.

The cameras can operate automatically. Algorithms can classify vehicles. Databases can log searches. Software can impose permissions. None of those things eliminates human motive.

An officer decides what vehicle to search.

An investigator decides whether the result is relevant.

A supervisor decides whether a search was appropriate.

An administrator determines who receives access.

An agency decides what information it will share.

Recent reporting about alleged misuse of license-plate-reader systems has demonstrated why those human decisions matter. The concern is no longer merely hypothetical. Cases involving allegations that officers used law-enforcement databases for personal purposes have forced Flock, police departments and the public to confront a basic question: what happens when someone with legitimate access uses a legitimate tool for an illegitimate purpose?

The system does not know whether an officer is searching for an armed robbery suspect or improperly checking on someone in his personal life unless safeguards, policies and auditing mechanisms detect that distinction.

The technology can be identical in both circumstances.

The intent is different.

This Is Where Oversight Becomes Critical

It is tempting to assume that recording every search solves the problem. Audit logs are certainly important because they can establish who searched for what and when. But logging an action and preventing abuse are not the same thing.

A record becomes meaningful oversight only when someone reviews it.

An organization therefore needs mechanisms capable of identifying suspicious patterns, supervisors willing to investigate questionable searches and meaningful consequences when access is abused. Depending entirely on individual integrity is inadequate when the underlying capability is powerful enough to reconstruct information about people’s movements.

This principle extends far beyond Flock.

Intelligence agencies, banks, hospitals, technology companies and police departments all maintain databases containing information that employees may have legitimate reasons to access. The existence of a legitimate reason for some access does not create a legitimate reason for every search.

The same principle should apply to ALPR systems.

The question should not merely be whether an officer is technically capable of conducting a search. It should be whether the officer has a legitimate investigative purpose for doing so, whether that purpose is documented and whether meaningful oversight exists to detect violations.

The Paradox of Flock

The most interesting thing about the Flock debate is that both sides are reacting to exactly the same characteristic of the technology: it is powerful.

Supporters look at that power and see an abducted child located more quickly, a stolen vehicle recovered, a homicide suspect identified or a dangerous offender found before another crime occurs.

Critics look at precisely the same capability and see the possibility of tracking innocent people, investigating political activity, monitoring personal relationships or allowing an abusive official to locate someone who has committed no crime.

Neither side needs to misunderstand the technology to reach those conclusions.

The same search capability can produce both outcomes.

Imagine two police officers sitting at the same computer using the same Flock interface. One searches for a vehicle associated with a missing child. The other searches for the vehicle of an estranged romantic partner without legitimate investigative justification.

The camera cannot distinguish the morality of those searches.

The database cannot determine the officer’s true motive simply by reading his mind.

The most important variable in that equation remains human judgment.

This Is an Intelligence Problem

We often think of intelligence as secret agents, classified documents, intercepted communications and analysts working inside government facilities. In reality, intelligence begins with something much simpler: collecting information, organizing it, connecting it and turning it into something useful for decision-making.

By that definition, automated license plate recognition is an intelligence capability.

A camera produces an observation.

Software categorizes the observation.

A database preserves it.

A search connects it to other information.

A human being interprets the result.

That sequence should sound familiar to anyone who has worked in intelligence, law enforcement or military operations. The technology is new, but the underlying process is not.

And neither is the fundamental danger.

Information without context can mislead. Intelligence without oversight can be abused. Powerful tools placed in the hands of poorly trained or poorly supervised people can produce consequences that the designers never intended.

This is why the debate over Flock cannot end with whether the technology “works.”

Of course it works.

The more consequential question is what institutions do with the capability once they possess it.

For Most of History, Forgetting Was Automatic

There is a broader social transformation occurring underneath all of this.

For most of human history, ordinary movement was ephemeral. You drove down a road, walked through a store or visited another town and the overwhelming majority of those movements simply disappeared from collective memory. Someone might have seen you, but unless something important happened, nobody created a permanent or searchable record of the encounter.

Digital technology increasingly reverses that assumption.

Observations become data. Data becomes searchable history. Searchable history can become intelligence, and intelligence confers power on whoever is authorized to use it.

Flock is only one manifestation of that transformation. Smartphones, credit-card transactions, toll systems, location services, doorbell cameras and countless other technologies have created different forms of digital memory around everyday life.

What makes automated license plate recognition especially interesting is that participation is not necessarily something a motorist consciously chooses. A driver does not click “accept” before passing a roadside camera. The observation occurs because the vehicle physically entered the camera’s field of view.

That creates difficult questions for a society whose privacy laws were largely developed before technology made this degree of automated observation inexpensive and scalable.

The Question America Hasn’t Answered

The Flock debate is often reduced to a choice between public safety and privacy, but that framing is too simplistic. Americans generally want police to possess effective tools for finding abducted children, solving murders and recovering stolen vehicles. Americans also have a long constitutional and cultural tradition of distrusting unchecked government surveillance.

Those principles do not have to be mutually exclusive.

The challenge is determining where legitimate investigative capability ends and unreasonable surveillance begins. That requires difficult conversations about warrants, reasonable suspicion, data retention, interstate sharing, audit requirements, access controls and consequences for misuse.

It also requires technological literacy from elected officials and the public.

A city council cannot meaningfully oversee a surveillance system if its members believe they are merely approving the purchase of a few cameras. They need to understand the database behind those cameras, how searches operate, who receives access, how long observations remain available, which agencies can see them and what safeguards exist when someone misuses that access.

Because the small camera beside the road is ultimately the least interesting part of Flock.

The important part is what happens after your vehicle passes it.

A plate becomes an observation. An observation becomes data. Data can become a lead, and a lead can help an investigator find a stolen car, locate a missing child or identify someone responsible for a violent crime.

But accumulated observations can also reveal patterns about people who have never been accused of anything.

That is the bargain America is beginning to confront.

The question is not simply whether Flock can find a vehicle. Increasingly sophisticated technology makes that question relatively easy.

The harder question is who should be allowed to look, under what circumstances, for how long, and who is watching them when they do?

BEFORE THE COMMANDER

There is a deceptively simple rule that Col. Michael “Foot” Millen, USAF (Ret.), carried into some of the most chaotic environments of his military career.

Michael Millen does not mean that metaphorically. He means physically running.

“You should never see a commander running. You should never see a colonel running. Like, nobody should ever see a commander sprinting somewhere.”

The reason has almost nothing to do with running and everything to do with communication.

A commander is constantly communicating, including when he says nothing at all. His face communicates. His posture communicates. His movements communicate. The speed and tone of his voice communicate. When something explodes outside an operations building and nobody yet knows what happened, the people in that room will inevitably look toward the person responsible for leading them.

If that person appears frightened, the fear spreads.

If he appears in control, something else can spread instead.

“If you lose your cool, everything for everybody else becomes somewhat hopeless. And so you have to develop an affected calm.”

Millen spent decades developing that calm.

He accumulated approximately 3,500 fighter hours and 800 combat hours. He flew the A-10 Thunderbolt II in combat, commanded the 354th Fighter Squadron, the “Bulldogs,” during a deployment to Kandahar, and later commanded the 455th Expeditionary Operations Group at Bagram.

He operated in places where communication failures could have consequences measured not in lost revenue or bruised feelings, but in human lives.

Yet one of the most interesting things about Millen is how unlikely the beginning of this story sounds when compared with its conclusion.

When he arrived at the United States Air Force Academy in 1986, he barely knew anything about airplanes.

“I had no idea what I was doing!.”

In fact, Millen remembers standing with other cadets near an F-4 Phantom while instructions were being shouted at them.

There was a slight problem.

He knew what an F-14 was.

Top Gun had just come out.

That was about it.

An Accidental Beginning

Millen had not grown up immersed in military culture. His father attended Georgia Tech, and going there himself had seemed like the natural trajectory.

Then he started investigating the service academies.

He visited West Point and quickly determined it was not for him.

“It was like this gray, foreboding place out in the middle of nowhere. And the uniforms are gray, and everything is gray, and I didn’t like it.”

He applied elsewhere. Newt Gingrich, then his congressman, nominated him to the Naval Academy. Senator Sam Nunn provided his Air Force Academy nomination.

Millen chose the Air Force.

There was no elaborate childhood plan behind it.

“Nobody in my family ever served and so I didn’t know much about the military at all. It was kind of an adventure.”

The adventure became a career.

“I can’t imagine not having done it. I can’t imagine having done anything else looking back.”

Even his academic performance offers little indication of what was coming.

“I flunked out of computer science my sophomore year and became a political science major.”

Years later, someone working on a book asked Millen to determine where he had ranked in his Air Force Academy class.

Millen assumed he had been somewhere around the middle.

He called to find out.

He discovered he had been somewhere in the 800s out of 991.

“I wish I hadn’t.”

Then something remarkable happened.

Millen went to pilot training and finished second in his class.

The cadet near the bottom of one institutional ranking had entered an environment that suited him and suddenly found himself near the top.

That lesson would become important later when Millen became responsible for evaluating other people.

Rankings matter. Résumés matter. Records matter.

But people are more complicated than paper.

The Day an A-10 Was Left on the Board

When Millen went through pilot training, aircraft assignments were made in a process seemingly designed to test the cardiovascular health of young aviators.

Multiple training bases were connected by conference call. Students were ordered by performance. Available assignments disappeared one after another as pilots made selections.

“There’s this giant bell curve of stress because the guys at the top know what they’re going to probably get, and the guys at the bottom know what they’re going to get, and the guys in the middle don’t.”

There were only five fighter assignments in Millen’s drop.

Then the pilot immediately ahead of him selected a C-141 assignment to McGuire.

An A-10 remained.

Someone on the conference call said the previous pilot’s selection had not been understood.

Millen had understood it perfectly.

“I said, ‘I could understand it,’ because if he picked that, that meant there was an A-10 left there for me.”

His turn arrived.

Millen stood.

“I stood up and said, ‘Columbus takes an A-10.’”

He remembers what happened physically afterward.

“Then thrilled to my toes.”

His career had found its airplane.

Sitting on Top of the Gun

The A-10 Thunderbolt II is an aircraft whose reputation often precedes its pilots.

Designed around its enormous GAU-8/A cannon and optimized for close air support, the Warthog became particularly beloved among American ground forces.

For Millen, however, there was a moment before all the combat missions and command responsibilities when it was simply an airplane he desperately wanted to fly.

Weeks after receiving the assignment, an A-10 arrived at Columbus.

Millen and his friend went to see it.

Then came training.

There is no conventional two-seat trainer version of the A-10, meaning that eventually a young pilot reaches a remarkable moment: he climbs into the airplane alone.

“The first time you walk out to go start it up, you take the instructor out there with you and you start the airplane and shut it back down. And it’s just cool.”

Millen remembers the physical presence of it.

“It’s a big airplane for a fighter. Sits up really high, got a gun, you know, you’re sitting up high like you rule the world.”

Then came another rite of passage.

Firing that gun.

“I think everybody that’s ever flown the airplane remembers the first time they shot the gun. I mean, it’s an experience.”

The cannon eventually reaches approximately 69 rounds per second.

Inside the cockpit, that is not merely something a pilot hears.

He feels it.

“The whole cockpit’s kind of like that too. You’re sitting on top of it. So it rattles everything while you’re shooting it. It pegs the G meter in both directions. It just shakes. It shakes.”

And then comes the grin.

“You get this big shit eating grin that just won’t go away. And you’re in a great mood the rest of the day.”

Millen had become an A-10 pilot.

But Korea would begin turning him into something else.

A decision maker.

Learning to Communicate Without Someone Holding Your Hand

Millen’s first operational assignment took him to the 19th Tactical Air Support Squadron at Osan Air Base in Korea.

His mission involved forward air control.

The significance was not merely tactical. It forced a relatively inexperienced officer to develop independent judgment much earlier than he otherwise might have.

In a conventional A-10 squadron, Millen explained, a young pilot could spend considerable time as a wingman learning beneath a flight lead.

Korea was different.

“In this squadron, you’re on your own.”

He laughs about what that means for a young lieutenant.

“You’re a dumb lieutenant.”

But putting that lieutenant into a position requiring him to understand the battlefield, communicate with people on the ground, coordinate other aircraft and make decisions produces rapid development.

“You end up having a very steep learning curve and get a lot of the traits that you’ll need later, a lot of the experience that you’ll need later to lead a two-ship of A-10s.”

This is where Millen’s story begins intersecting directly with the mission of The Human Intelligence Ledger.

Military aviation is filled with extraordinary technology, but the technology ultimately connects human beings.

A pilot sees something.

A controller communicates something.

A person on the ground describes something.

Someone interprets it.

Someone questions it.

Someone makes a decision.

And sometimes the most important communication is simply saying no.

Millen would eventually watch young pilots do exactly that.

The Scottish Problem

Years later, during operations in Afghanistan, Millen encountered a problem that sounds almost comical until one considers what they were discussing.

He could not understand the man on the radio.

The controller was Scottish.

“I’m out there talking to this ground controller and I can’t understand anything. You know, the further north you get in the UK, the harder it is.”

This was not casual conversation. They were trying to coordinate military operations.

Several days later, Millen was standing near a smoke pit when a man approached and started talking.

Again, Millen could barely understand him.

After several minutes, realization struck.

“I realized it’s the same guy.”

The Scottish controller had come to meet the Americans and improve their coordination.

Millen could have laughed about the accent and moved on.

Instead, he created his own informal language immersion program.

The Scots happened to live between Millen’s area and the dining facilities.

“Every night when I went by, I would pick up four or five. I had a Hilux like everybody had. I would pick up four or five Scotsmen and make one sit shotgun and talk to him on the way to the chow hall.”

Why?

“That’s how I got better at talking to the Scottish.”

It is a small story buried among much larger ones.

But it reveals something important.

Communication is not the responsibility of the other person.

If the person you need to understand speaks differently, thinks differently or operates within another culture, sometimes leadership means changing yourself until communication works.

Later, the stakes would become much higher.

When Training Became Real

Millen’s first combat came in Iraq.

He had already deployed repeatedly to the region supporting Operation Southern Watch and watched the enormous buildup preceding the 2003 invasion.

When combat finally arrived, Millen discovered something about American military training.

It worked.

“Our training is so good that it’s not seamless, but it’s really close to seamless.”

There were frustrations with command and control, but at the tactical level, the transition was remarkably familiar.

“Where the rubber meets the road, it’s very much like training.”

Millen then offered a sentence that probably could only come from a fighter pilot.

“It’s just more fun killing something in somebody else’s backyard than it is doing it in Arizona.”

There was no cinematic transformation.

He did what he had practiced doing.

“Other than coming home on the way back, you think about it. But other than that, it was just like what we trained for.”

That was the point.

“We do a really good job of, at least we did, of getting guys ready to go to war.”

Iraq and Afghanistan would prove unusually well suited to the A-10.

“Iraq and Afghanistan were almost tailor made for the A-10.”

Afghanistan in particular increasingly involved identifying individual people rather than massed formations.

“Every target was a person. You know, it might be a person at a truck, but it was about killing specific people in a specific place.”

That made judgment extraordinarily important.

“There’s really no better weapon for that than a gun. And the A-10’s gun is better than everybody else’s. So it became kind of the perfect theater for the A-10.”

But Millen learned that an A-10 did not always have to fire to accomplish something important.

Sometimes communication occurred simply through presence.

The Message Sent by an Airplane Overhead

Millen spent time training alongside Army personnel and learning how air power looked from the ground.

That experience altered his understanding of what constituted a successful mission.

Sometimes American troops did not need him to destroy something.

They needed the enemy to know he was there.

“Sometimes your job is to become visible.”

The presence of an A-10 overhead could change enemy behavior.

“If you can be over the friendlies, just present, so that the enemy will stop shooting at them, so they can maybe take off their body armor and maybe get clean, maybe lunch in peace and quiet for 15, 20, 30 minutes, then that’s your job today.”

No rounds expended.

No spectacular gun-camera footage.

Just a message delivered without words.

We are here.

Millen understood its value.

“You just take pressure off the friendlies for a little bit. And it’s a meaningful mission.”

It is difficult to find a better illustration of communication without language.

And it foreshadows the leadership philosophy Millen would later employ as a commander.

Sometimes people do not need a speech.

They need to look up and know someone is there.

COMMUNICATION WHEN THE CONSEQUENCES ARE LIFE AND DEATH

By the time Michael Millen took command of the 354th Fighter Squadron, the young lieutenant who once did not know an F-4 from an F-150 had become responsible for something far more complicated than an aircraft.

People.

That distinction is fundamental to understanding Millen.

When I asked him near the end of our conversation what mattered most when he looked backward across his career, he did not begin talking about the A-10’s gun.

He talked about people.

“The people are everything.”

And one of those people was a young A-10 pilot named Ethan Sabin .

The Millen-Sabin Nexus

Years later, Sabin would retire from the United States Air Force as a colonel himself.

I attended that retirement ceremony at Nellis Air Force Base.

Millen was there.

That fact matters.

Because decades earlier, their relationship had been commander and young pilot.

Millen had identified Sabin as someone he wanted in his squadron.

He did not passively inherit the entire organization he eventually took to war. He fought to construct it.

“From the time I took command, I knew we were going to Afghanistan. And everything I did was people related.”

Millen was preparing a combat unit.

His primary concern was not simply equipment.

“All I did was try to get the best people because that’s everything.”

Then he said it plainly.

“The people are everything.”

Sabin was supposed to go elsewhere.

Millen intervened.

“I stole Ethan. He was supposed to go to Moody, he was supposed to go to a different squadron, and I stole him. I 100% did.”

He also fought to keep other pilots beyond the points when personnel officials wanted to move them.

“I spoke every week with personnel command to prevent them from moving guys, from preventing them from stealing guys to go do other jobs.”

Some people left.

Others stayed.

“By the time we left, I had the guys that I wanted.”

This is the nexus between Millen and Sabin that makes their story so important.

Millen did not merely command Sabin.

He selected him.

Then he helped create an environment in which Sabin and other young officers were expected to think independently, communicate honestly and make difficult decisions.

Decades later, Millen watched Sabin retire as a colonel.

That is leadership measured across generations.

The Explosion at Kandahar

Millen’s theory of command was tested almost immediately at Kandahar.

He had just sent his first two pilots toward their aircraft for the squadron’s first sortie.

Then came an enormous explosion.

“There’s a giant explosion in that direction outside the building.”

A British Tornado had suffered a problem during takeoff. Its crew ejected and the aircraft crashed near the runway, exploding.

For Millen, the first requirement was emotional discipline.

“You take a deep breath and you be calm, and your calm will spread to everybody else.”

Read that sentence carefully.

Your calm will spread.

Leadership, in Millen’s conception, is contagious communication.

So is panic.

Millen did not yet possess complete information. Nobody did.

The solution was not pretending otherwise.

It was giving people purposeful tasks.

“This is a situation where you have no information. I don’t know what’s going on.”

So he began assigning responsibilities.

“You call this person. You go outside and see if you can figure out what’s happening without putting yourself in danger. Go talk to maintenance, find out what they’re seeing.”

Different people gathered different pieces of information.

Communication converted chaos into a problem that could be solved.

Meanwhile, the mission continued.

They still had aircraft scheduled to launch.

The runway situation had changed.

Takeoff calculations had to be reconsidered.

Decisions had to be made.

The pilots eventually launched approximately ten minutes late and completed their tasking.

That is what “affected calm” looks like in practice.

A Commander Is Always Communicating

Millen had received an important piece of advice before assuming command.

As a director of operations, there were circumstances in which losing your temper might be tolerated.

Command was different.

“When you’re a commander, you can’t lose your shit unless you’re doing it for effect and you have to plan it.”

Millen took that seriously.

His external calm did not necessarily reflect what was happening internally.

“It is a very affected, deliberate calm. That is not what’s going on inside.”

That distinction is fascinating.

Authenticity is often treated as the supreme virtue of modern leadership. Millen’s experience suggests something more nuanced.

A leader does not have an unlimited right to transmit every emotion he experiences to the people depending upon him.

Sometimes leadership requires emotional filtration.

But Millen also discovered that anger itself could be a communication tool.

If used carefully.

The Time Millen Planned to Lose His Temper

Approximately halfway through a six-month deployment, Millen noticed deterioration.

People had been deployed long enough to feel exhausted, but not long enough to see the finish line.

Standards were slipping.

“You’ve been there forever and you feel like you’re going to be there forever because you can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel yet.”

The deterioration appeared first in small things.

“People just get sloppy.”

Facilities were not being maintained properly. Things were being left around. Discipline was beginning to erode.

Millen decided to address it.

But rather than genuinely losing emotional control, he planned a performance of anger.

Because the operation ran around the clock, he had to repeat it for different shifts.

“I had to lose my shit three times.”

He assembled people and deliberately unleashed the commander.

Then everyone scattered and started fixing things.

After the second performance, Millen quietly approached one of his flight commanders who had witnessed both.

He asked for a critique.

“I just kind of sidled over to the ops desk and leaned over to him and I said, ‘Hey, how was that one?’”

The officer responded:

“It was better than the first one. I was actually scared that time.”

It worked.

But Millen immediately adds the caveat.

“It can only be effective if you don’t do it all the time.”

That is sophisticated communication.

The volume mattered because silence was his normal condition.

Anger carried information precisely because anger was rare.

When a Young Pilot Says No

Perhaps the most important communication culture Millen describes, however, was not commanders communicating downward.

It was subordinates communicating upward.

One of Millen’s young pilots was operating in Afghanistan when higher command directed him to leave one location and move somewhere else.

The pilot refused.

“He wouldn’t do it.”

That is an extraordinary phrase in a military organization.

But the pilot believed the people where he currently was faced the greater danger.

He called the operations desk and explained himself.

“This is where I need to be. This is actually where the danger is. And they’re trying to move me to another place and it’s not the right answer.”

Millen knew the pilot.

He trusted him.

The squadron backed him.

“We called the ASOC and they weren’t happy with us.”

But they backed down.

The young pilot stayed.

This is where communication, trust and command converge.

The purpose of a military hierarchy is not to eliminate human judgment.

It is to place judgment where it can be exercised effectively and create communication channels strong enough that the person closest to reality can speak.

Sometimes that person is a colonel.

Sometimes it is a lieutenant.

Sometimes it is an enlisted controller on the ground.

Rank does not change what someone can see through his own eyes.

“I’m Not Shooting Him”

Another pilot received a targeting instruction near Kandahar.

A man had been identified as hostile because he possessed an AK-47 and was sleeping on his roof.

The pilot looked at the situation.

And refused.

“He said, ‘I don’t believe that you can identify that as an enemy combatant. And I’m not shooting him.’”

Millen understood the pilot’s reasoning.

In Afghanistan during the summer, a civilian farmer sleeping on his roof beside an AK-47 was hardly inconceivable.

Possession of the weapon alone did not convince the pilot that the man was an enemy combatant.

So he said no.

I asked Millen directly whether the pilot had essentially refused an order.

“Yep.”

What happened?

“We backed him and it went away. They backed down.”

There are countless leadership seminars about encouraging employees to “speak up.”

This was not a seminar.

A human being was alive beneath an American aircraft.

A young pilot had seconds or minutes to interpret what he saw, compare it with what he had been told, and communicate disagreement upward through a military command structure.

Then his commanders had to decide whether their culture of trust was real.

It was.

“They Look Like Americans”

There were other incidents.

“We also had a couple young guys say, ‘Hey, I’m looking at these guys you’re telling me to shoot right now. I’m looking at it in my targeting pod and they look like Americans. They move like Americans.’”

Millen paused.

“And it was because they were Americans.”

That sentence should make anyone interested in leadership, intelligence or law enforcement stop.

Technology provided the image.

Higher headquarters provided information.

But a human being inside a cockpit recognized something that did not fit.

They move like Americans.

That is human intelligence in its most elemental form.

Pattern recognition.

Experience.

Instinct.

Observation.

And the willingness to communicate uncertainty before pressing a button that cannot be unpressed.

When the Rules and the Mission Collide

Another pilot faced an entirely different problem.

Weather prevented him from reaching troops who were under fire without crossing Pakistani airspace.

By that point, unauthorized entry into Pakistan had become a serious issue.

The pilot knew the restriction.

He also knew Americans needed him.

He crossed.

Millen later spoke with his commander and reviewed what had happened.

The explanation was straightforward.

“He had no choice. He had no option to get there other than to go through Pakistan.”

The pilot knew what he was doing.

“He knew he was breaking the rules when he did it, but he didn’t have another option.”

Millen’s superior, General Joe Guastella, wanted the circumstances verified. He wasn’t angry or concerned he just wanted to make sure it was necessary

Millen did so.

But the command climate mattered.

“When you have good commanders, they trust their guys.”

Millen trusted his squadron commanders and pilots. Guastella trusted Millen. Above them was Lt. Gen. David “Fingers” Goldfein.

The matter ultimately disappeared.

“We never heard another word about it.”

Trust had traveled upward through the organization because communication had traveled with it.

The Staff Sergeant Who Could Tell the Colonel What to Do

Millen later commanded at Bagram.

He continued flying.

That produced situations that reveal something profound about functional authority.

On some missions, Millen might be flying with General Guastella.

An O-6 and O-7 were in the aircraft.

Yet the person controlling the tactical situation could be a young enlisted servicemember on the ground.

“There were days where I was flying with General Guastella. So you’ve got an O-6 and an O-7 and the guy in charge of us, who’s running the show, is an airman or staff sergeant.”

And Millen emphasizes:

“He’s really the guy in charge.”

That is what disciplined organizations understand.

Rank determines command authority.

But expertise, position and information determine who needs to be heard at a particular moment.

A good colonel knows when to command.

A great one also knows when to listen.

THE PEOPLE ARE THE LEGACY

When Millen arrived at Bagram to assume enormous operational responsibility, he remembers looking outside from the jump seat of a C-17 on final approach.

What he saw was almost overwhelming.

“I look out the window and all I see is just this giant airfield bursting at the seams.”

Aircraft were everywhere.

“Crap everywhere. Airplanes taking off, landing all the time. Helicopters and fighters and transports.”

His immediate internal reaction was less polished than anything one might find in an official command biography.

“Holy shit, that is a lot of stuff.”

For the first several weeks, Millen felt like he was barely staying above water.

“I was swimming as fast as I could, just trying to keep my head above water.”

The colonel responsible for helping lead an enormous combat aviation enterprise did not arrive magically knowing everything.

That matters.

Competence does not mean the absence of uncertainty.

Leadership means remaining functional inside it.

Competence Creates Calm

I asked Millen what separates commanders who remain composed during chaos from those who allow circumstances to control them.

His first answer was a joke.

“I think it’s height.”

Then came the real answer.

“It is absolutely competence and confidence.”

The two reinforce each other.

“I’ve never seen a competent commander, like, not be able to handle anything I threw at him.”

The opposite is also true.

“Guys that are not good at their jobs, that don’t have the self-confidence, you know, it’s kind of a combination of the two. They’re not very good at their jobs, and they know they’re not very good at their jobs, and they’re just worse at it.”

Communication cannot manufacture competence.

But competence changes communication.

A leader who understands his profession can listen without feeling threatened, delegate without feeling diminished and allow subordinates to challenge information without interpreting disagreement as insubordination.

That is precisely the environment Millen describes.

Practice Being Calm Before You Need to Be

Most readers of The Human Intelligence Ledger will never command a fighter squadron in Afghanistan.

They may, however, lead an investigation, handle a confidential source, command officers at an active scene, supervise an intelligence operation, manage an emergency, or find themselves in a moment when frightened people look toward them for direction.

Millen believes calm can be practiced.

“Start practicing the affected calm.”

Something interesting happens when you intentionally regulate your outward behavior.

“That affected calm, it actually has, like, it does actually calm you down.”

The performance changes the performer.

“If you are affecting a calm, somehow you become calm and clear-headed by forcing yourself to do it.”

Preparation matters too.

Millen compares it to what pilots call chair flying: mentally rehearsing a flight before ever getting airborne.

Leaders can do the same with crises.

“You can think about how you’re going to handle a crisis.”

Imagine unusual scenarios.

Ask what you would do.

Rehearse the first decision.

Practice the communication.

“The more you thought about what you’re going to do, the better off you’ll be when that hits and it’s time to solve it.”

The exact emergency may never occur.

That does not make the preparation useless.

“You’ll at least put yourself in that situation or a situation that maybe not similar but rhymes with it.”

That phrase is worth remembering.

A situation that rhymes with it.

The purpose of training is not to predict the future perfectly.

It is to ensure the future does not feel completely unfamiliar when it arrives.

Humor Is Communication Too

There is another component to Millen’s leadership philosophy that anyone who attended Ethan Sabin’s retirement ceremony witnessed immediately.

Millen is extremely funny.

The ceremony began with all the expected military formality. Then Millen stood before the room and delivered what at times resembled a comedy routine.

People were crying with laughter.

That was not separate from fighter culture.

It was part of it.

“Anybody that does things that are stressful, that involve people’s lives, the gallows humor is absolutely necessary.”

People working around death, violence and extraordinary stress need mechanisms for releasing pressure.

“You have to have it, because otherwise you’ll stress yourself into oblivion.”

The humor may occasionally be dark.

It may occasionally be inappropriate outside the culture.

But among people who have shared the experience, it communicates something important.

We survived this together.

“You have to have something to laugh at.”

Communication is not always a briefing, radio transmission or command.

Sometimes it is the joke that allows people to keep functioning.

From Colonel to First Officer

Today, Millen flies for FedEx.

The transition creates an interesting inversion.

The man who once commanded major military organizations now sits in a cockpit where someone else may be captain and an enormous logistics corporation tells him where the aircraft needs to go.

I asked whether that was frustrating.

It isn’t.

Millen understands something about expertise.

“I don’t want to be in charge of this because I don’t know anything about logistics.”

That statement is striking coming from someone with his command résumé.

He does not confuse previous authority with universal expertise.

“My take on logistics is whoever’s in charge of logistics is probably your most important person. And I don’t know anything about it, and I don’t need to. I just need to know somebody that does.”

So he listens.

“I’m happy to just drive the bus, happy to just drive the truck at FedEx, while somebody else makes really hard decisions, because I don’t know anything about it.”

There may be no better demonstration of mature leadership than knowing when you are no longer the person who should be leading.

The Commander Who “Stole” Ethan Sabin

And that brings the story back to Sabin.

When Millen commanded the Bulldogs, Sabin was one of the people he deliberately wanted.

Years passed.

Sabin accumulated his own combat experience, assumed his own responsibilities, eventually rose to colonel and built a career that became entirely his own.

Millen watched it happen.

When I asked what it was like seeing Sabin succeed and eventually reach colonel, Millen needed only one word.

“Overjoyed.”

He immediately broadened the answer to other people he had led.

“There’s nothing more rewarding than that. Nothing at all.”

This is where the Millen-Sabin relationship becomes much larger than either man.

The purpose of mentorship is not creating permanent followers.

It is creating people capable of eventually standing where you once stood.

Millen had once been Sabin’s commander.

At Sabin’s retirement, Millen was there watching the conclusion of another colonel’s career.

The chain had continued.

“It’s a No Brainer”

I ended our substantive conversation by asking Millen to choose.

When people look at his career decades from now, what would make him prouder?

The missions?

The combat?

The A-10?

Or people such as Ethan Sabin who carried lessons forward and eventually became leaders themselves?

Millen did not hesitate.

“It’s a no brainer. It’s the leaders that went on.”

That answer unlocked the meaning of much of what had preceded it.

His preparation for Kandahar had been centered on people from the beginning.

“Everything I did was people related.”

He fought personnel bureaucracy to keep people he believed belonged together.

He had been fortunate, too. He specifically praised his director of operations, Drew “Pooch” Kapuscak

“He was the perfect operations officer.”

Millen gives him enormous credit.

“Most of the things that happened getting ready for the deployment and in the deployment, Pooch did. He was amazing.”

That willingness to distribute credit is itself communication.

Millen does not tell the story as though the commander created success alone.

The organization did.

“I got the guys that I wanted in every key role. The young guys I got to keep, the young guys I wanted to keep, and I got new ones, and they were all really, really good.”

His hope is not that they remember every decision he made.

It is that they took something useful from serving together.

“Learn from my mistakes and learn from the things that I did that were successful.”

Then improve upon them.

“Move forward and be better commanders than I was.”

Many did.

“Many of them went on to do great things. And I love watching them.”

The Proudest Command

Finally, I asked Millen to identify what, aside from watching those people succeed, made him proudest.

Of all the assignments, combat missions and commands, was there one experience that remained above the others?

There was.

The Bulldogs’ deployment to Kandahar.

“The success of that Bulldog deployment. That one deployment to Kandahar.”

His answer again immediately turned away from himself.

“There was so much great work by the pilots on that deployment, by the maintenance guys on that deployment.”

Then he said something that captures the entire conversation.

“I have never had more fun working. I’ve never been prouder of a bunch of people, my pilots, the maintenance guys.”

And finally:

“I’m happy to be a part of it.”

Not I built it.

Not I commanded it.

Not I made it successful.

I’m happy to be a part of it.

That may be the most revealing sentence of all.

Communication Under Fire

Col. Michael “Foot” Millen’s career contains the elements that make military aviation fascinating: the Air Force Academy, the A-10, its enormous gun, Iraq, Afghanistan, Kandahar, Bagram and hundreds of hours spent flying in combat.

But those are not ultimately what this story is about.

It is about the invisible architecture connecting human beings under pressure.

It is a commander standing still when instinct tells everyone else to run.

It is deliberately lowering your voice because panic is contagious.

It is picking up Scottish soldiers on the way to dinner because you need to understand the accent on the radio.

It is a young pilot telling headquarters that he will not leave troops who need him.

It is another pilot looking at a man sleeping beside an AK-47 and saying:

“I’m not shooting him.”

It is an aviator looking through a targeting pod and noticing that the supposed enemy “look like Americans” and “move like Americans.”

It is a colonel and general listening to a staff sergeant because, at that moment, the staff sergeant knows more about the fight than they do.

It is a commander intentionally selecting people such as Ethan Sabin, trusting them, developing them, and then living long enough to watch them become colonels themselves.

And it is understanding that sometimes the strongest message a leader can communicate contains no words whatsoever.

Millen learned that with an A-10 overhead.

He learned it again when an aircraft exploded at Kandahar.

People watch the leader.

They listen to what he says.

They notice what he does not say.

They notice whether he trusts them.

They notice whether he listens.

And they certainly notice whether he runs.

“You take a deep breath and you be calm.”

Because, as Millen learned across a lifetime of combat and command:

“Your calm will spread to everybody else.”

That is communication under fire.

Tony Knight did not begin his professional life expecting to lead wildlife conservation operations across South Africa.

He studied supply chain engineering, moved to the United Kingdom and spent years building a career in advertising technology. After relocating to Toronto, he launched businesses that helped major brands identify precisely where their most likely customers lived and place advertising in those markets.

The work was profitable. Knight became successful. Yet the career never provided the sense of purpose he had experienced around wildlife.

Long before he entered advertising, conservation had been part of Knight’s life. His father was involved in wildlife rescue efforts in South Africa, and Knight assisted with conservation work as a child. He initially considered pursuing it professionally, but his father encouraged him to establish financial security first.

Knight eventually followed that advice. He built his companies, sold his business during the COVID era and returned to the mission that had remained with him since childhood.

Today, Knight divides his time between Canada and South Africa while supporting rhino protection through the Upmost Foundation and the U Rhino initiative.

His work brings together nonprofit fundraising, aviation, veterinary medicine, surveillance technology, local human intelligence and the men and women responsible for protecting individual reserves.

During our conversation for The Human Intelligence Ledger, Knight explained that protecting rhinos is not simply an environmental campaign. It is an intelligence contest against organized poaching networks that study security patterns, recruit local sources, exploit economic hardship and search constantly for weaknesses.

South Africa recorded 352 rhinos killed by poachers during 2025. Although that represented a 16 percent decline from the 420 killed in 2024, the continued loss of hundreds of animals every year demonstrates the scale of the threat.

Knight believes the battle can be won, but only if conservation organizations can maintain the funding, intelligence networks and operational consistency necessary to deny poachers access to valuable horns.

Building Trust in an Environment of Constant Risk

The work depends heavily on trust.

Private reserves employ rangers, canine teams and security personnel responsible for protecting their own territory. Conservation organizations such as Knight’s provide financial and operational assistance, particularly when a reserve is believed to face an imminent threat.

However, poverty and the extraordinary value attached to rhino horn create an environment in which almost anyone with useful information could become a target for recruitment.

“You are in Africa, so there is no guarantee that a ranger on your team could not potentially turn corrupt and become an informant for a poaching syndicate,” Knight explained. “We have never had that happen with the people we work with. The rangers are taken care of, looked after and paid properly, so there is little incentive for them to risk their careers for a single poaching payment.”

Knight does not personally recruit or manage the ranger forces. That responsibility remains with the individual reserves. His organization must nevertheless decide which reserves to support and whether the people providing information can be trusted.

“A lot of it is instinct, knowing the community and understanding who is trustworthy,” he said. “The independent reserves have their rangers in place. Our role is primarily to help fund the operation and secure the rhinos that are most vulnerable.”

The communication challenge is considerable. Rangers, pilots, veterinarians, volunteers, reserve managers and community sources may come from different professional, cultural and economic backgrounds. Their responsibilities are different, but their information must come together quickly enough to shape an operational response.

In that respect, rhino protection resembles many law enforcement and intelligence operations. Technology may provide the alarm, but human beings must interpret the threat, communicate clearly and decide what to do next.

Human Intelligence Inside the Villages

Poaching networks sometimes recruit local residents to provide information about rhino locations, ranger movements and security practices. Conservation teams respond by developing their own sources within communities near vulnerable reserves.

“We have informants on our side who go into the villages and keep their eyes and ears open for any discussion,” Knight said. “Poachers blend into the community. They may be speaking with people who are part of their team, and our informants are watching for signs that an attack is being organized.”

This is the traditional work of human intelligence. It requires access, discretion and the ability to distinguish meaningful information from rumor.

A single observation might appear insignificant. Combined with physical evidence found along a reserve perimeter, irregular activity reported by a ranger or information received from another community source, it can establish a much larger picture.

Knight said poachers have used arrangements of sticks and stones near reserve fences as simple signaling systems. Rangers therefore inspect fence lines not only for damage or tracks, but also for objects that may have been deliberately positioned to communicate with another member of a poaching team.

“These syndicates do not simply arrive and improvise,” Knight said. “They can spend months studying a reserve. They study how the rangers move, where the weaknesses are and how the entire reserve operates.”

That extended planning period provides conservation teams with an opportunity. When intelligence suggests that a reserve has been selected, Knight’s organization can intervene before the poachers execute their plan.

“If we receive information that a reserve is under threat, we go in and secure every rhino we can,” he explained. “The objective is to make the poachers move somewhere else and begin their planning process all over again.”

The strategy is based on persistent disruption. Every cancelled operation costs the poachers time, money and access. Every security improvement forces them to reconsider whether the potential reward justifies the risk.

Removing the Incentive Without Killing the Animal

One of the most important defensive measures is dehorning.

Rhino horn is composed primarily of keratin, the same structural protein found in human hair and fingernails. A properly conducted dehorning procedure removes most of the visible horn while leaving enough material to avoid cutting into the growth area. The horn later grows back, which means the procedure must be repeated.

Knight described the process as trimming rather than permanently removing the horn.

“The horn grows back, so every two years we have to return and trim it again,” he said. “We have to prioritize the reserves in the highest poaching areas because we do not have unlimited funding.”

Dehorning does not eliminate every risk. A remaining horn stump may still have some illegal value, and poachers may kill animals even after discovering that a horn has already been removed. However, when combined with ranger patrols, intelligence sources, tracking systems and rapid intervention, dehorning can significantly reduce the financial incentive behind an attack.

“A rhino without a valuable horn is far less attractive to poachers,” Knight said. “Our goal is to remain consistent and prevent the syndicates from obtaining what they came for.”

Knight has developed a four year theory of sustained deterrence. It is not a scientifically guaranteed deadline, but an operational objective. He believes that if conservation teams can repeatedly prevent poaching networks from obtaining horns, those networks may eventually redirect their resources elsewhere.

“If they continue spending money and planning operations but cannot obtain a horn, why would they keep trying?” he asked. “Our defense has to remain solid long enough to make the operation no longer worthwhile.”

Technology Cannot Replace the Ranger

Modern conservation operations increasingly use drones, tracking devices and electronic monitoring. Knight described ankle mounted sensors capable of establishing a baseline for a rhino’s normal movement.

When an animal suddenly moves in an unusual way or appears to be in distress, the system can transmit an alert and location information to the conservation team.

“That information can be sent directly to a phone,” Knight explained. “The reserve can dispatch its rangers, and if drones are available, a drone can reach the location first and show the team what is happening.”

Installing such systems is expensive. Towers and supporting communications infrastructure may be required across enormous properties. Many reserves cannot afford the technology.

For those reserves, the primary defense remains the ranger.

“Every reserve at least needs a trained ranger team and canine units,” Knight said. “The dogs are excellent at tracking people. That remains the foundation of the defense.”

Technology expands a ranger’s reach, but it does not replace the judgment of the people on the ground. A sensor can identify unusual movement. A drone can provide imagery. Neither can question a source, interpret community behavior, recognize a subtle change in a fence line or determine whether a piece of information is credible.

The strength of the operation therefore comes from combining technical collection with human intelligence.

The Economics Behind the Killing

The international demand for rhino horn is driven partly by unsupported claims that it possesses medicinal properties and partly by its use as a symbol of wealth and status.

Knight said the primary consumer markets are in parts of East and Southeast Asia, where some buyers continue to believe rhino horn can treat serious illnesses or improve sexual performance. There is no credible scientific evidence supporting those beliefs.

The extraordinary black market value of the horn allows organized traffickers to recruit people living near protected areas, finance months of surveillance and move the product through multiple criminal intermediaries.

Knight cautioned against viewing poachers only as desperate individuals acting independently. The person who enters a reserve may be economically vulnerable, but the larger trade can involve financiers, brokers, transporters, corrupt facilitators and international traffickers.

“This is not someone casually walking into a reserve,” Knight said. “The people behind the trade are sophisticated. There is planning, money and an organized market waiting for the horn.”

The financial structure resembles other forms of transnational trafficking. The people exposed to the greatest immediate danger are frequently located near the bottom of the organization, while those earning the largest profits remain far from the reserve.

The Cruelty Behind the Trade

For Knight, the most difficult part of the mission is not the economics or even the operational complexity. It is the suffering inflicted on the animals.

Poachers may avoid using firearms because the sound could alert rangers. In some attacks, an animal is immobilized or injured before its horn is violently removed. A rhino that survives the initial assault can remain alive with catastrophic facial injuries unless a response team reaches it quickly.

“The cruelty is one of the main reasons we do this,” Knight said. “The animal can be left alive, bleeding and suffering. That is the reality we are trying to prevent.”

Operational Security in the Age of Social Media

Social media can generate donations and public awareness, but it can also expose sensitive information.

Knight’s organization occasionally allows a limited number of donors and volunteers to participate in conservation operations. Participants may observe veterinary procedures, learn how biological samples are collected and see how tracking equipment is installed.

The experience can turn a donor into a lifelong advocate. It can also create an operational security problem when photographs, locations or identifying details are posted publicly.

“We are extremely careful with population figures and location information,” Knight said. “People search Instagram, Facebook and other platforms looking for clues about where rhinos with horns might be located.”

A photograph does not need to contain coordinates to reveal a location. Mountain formations, vegetation, road markings, aircraft registrations, buildings or tagged accounts may provide enough information for someone familiar with the region to narrow down the reserve.

Participants must therefore understand that a conservation operation is not simply an adventure to document online. It is a security mission involving animals whose survival may depend on disciplined communication.

The Search for Sustainable Funding

The greatest obstacle is predictability.

A single grant may finance operations for several months. Once it expires, the organization can be left without enough money to respond to an emergency.

Helicopters are particularly important and particularly expensive. They allow veterinarians and conservation teams to locate animals across vast reserves, conduct dehorning procedures and respond to urgent intelligence. Without reliable funding, aircraft may remain grounded precisely when they are needed most.

“We may receive a grant that keeps us operating for two or three months,” Knight said. “Then it runs out. If an emergency happens after that, we may not have the resources to put the helicopter in the air.”

Knight is searching for individual benefactors and corporate sponsors willing to provide recurring support rather than one time contributions.

“If we know a dependable amount is coming every month, we can plan,” he said. “We can determine which reserves face the greatest risk and allocate resources accordingly.”

He envisions sponsors becoming active participants in the mission. A company could finance an annual program, send representatives to observe the work and then share the results with employees and customers.

The arrangement would provide the conservation team with operational stability while allowing the sponsor to demonstrate a tangible commitment to protecting an endangered species.

“The person who provides the funding is part of the mission,” Knight said. “The rangers and conservation teams perform the work, but the person keeping the helicopter in the air is helping us win the same battle.”

A Mission Bigger Than One Country

Knight’s connection to the rhino is deeply personal. These animals inhabit the country where he was born and raised. He views their protection as part of South Africa’s responsibility to future generations.

Yet extinction would not be a South African loss alone.

“If rhinos disappear, it will be a terrible day for South Africa, but it will also be a terrible day for the world,” he said. “We feel a responsibility because this is our homeland, but these animals belong to the world’s natural heritage.”

Governments, law enforcement agencies and international organizations all have roles in combating wildlife trafficking. However, much of the immediate work continues to fall on private reserves, nonprofit organizations, veterinarians, pilots, rangers and community sources.

Their mission depends on an intelligence network that stretches from a conversation inside a village to an aircraft flying above a threatened reserve.

A source hears something unusual. A ranger notices a deliberate marking along a fence. A monitoring device reports irregular movement. A reserve manager communicates the threat. A helicopter carries the veterinary team to the animal before the poachers can reach it.

Every part of that chain matters.

The battle to save the rhino is therefore not won through one dramatic confrontation. It is won through disciplined communication, trusted relationships, persistent intelligence collection and the ability to act before the adversary does.

Knight believes the poaching networks can be defeated economically, but conservation organizations must first prove that their defenses can outlast the criminals attempting to penetrate them.

“We are entirely in defensive mode,” he said. “We have to keep interrupting their plans, protecting the animals and denying them the horn. If we remain consistent, I believe we can win this war.”

About Tony Knight

Tony Knight is a South African born advertising technology entrepreneur and wildlife conservation advocate based between Toronto and South Africa. He supports rhino protection operations through the Upmost Foundation and U Rhino, working with private reserves, veterinary teams, pilots and local conservation personnel.

Individuals and companies interested in supporting the organization can learn more through the U Rhino initiative and the Upmost Foundation.

Make sure to visit the U Rhino website by following this link ---->

https://urhino.org

If you are a private donor or corporate sponsor interested in supporting rhino conservation through sponsorship or a donation, please contact Tony Knight directly via the email listed below:

Info@upmostfoundation.org

Colonel Keil Gentry , USMC (Ret.), has spent more than three decades leading Marines from battery to regiment. A graduate of the United States Naval Academy, he served as Executive Officer of Regimental Combat Team 1 during the Second Battle of Fallujah, Operation Phantom Fury, commanded 2nd Battalion, 11th Marines and the 12th Marine Regiment, served as Head of National Plans at Headquarters United States Marine Corps , advised the Commandant of the Marine Corps as Deputy Legislative Assistant, directed the Marine Corps War College, and today serves as Director of the National Museum of the Marine Corps, where he is entrusted with preserving the history, traditions, and legacy of one of America’s most respected fighting forces.

For me, however, Colonel Gentry is more than a distinguished Marine. He is my first cousin and, for as long as I can remember, one of my personal heroes. Watching his remarkable career unfold has been both inspiring and humbling, making this interview for The Human Intelligence Ledger as personal as it was professionally meaningful.

This conversation was never intended to be a chronological review of Colonel Gentry’s career. My readership, composed largely of senior military leaders, law enforcement executives, intelligence professionals, and government officials, is interested less in résumés than in the principles behind exceptional leadership. I wanted to understand how one of the Marine Corps’ most accomplished leaders builds trust, develops relationships, evaluates people, communicates under pressure, and makes critical decisions when lives depend upon those decisions.

Those questions lie at the heart of The Human Intelligence Ledger. Human intelligence is not simply the collection of information. It is understanding people, earning trust, recognizing truth from deception, and communicating effectively in environments where uncertainty is the only constant. Few careers illustrate those principles more completely than Colonel Gentry’s.

I began with what I believed was the most important question of our conversation.

Throughout your career, from Operation Phantom Fury to advising the Commandant of the Marine Corps and now preserving the Corps’ legacy, how important have understanding people, earning trust, reading human behavior, and building relationships been to your success as a leader?

Colonel Gentry did not pause before answering.

Trust, Intelligence, and Living on the Razor’s Edge

“Relationship building and knowing your people are absolutely critical to being successful as a leader and, frankly, as a human being, because it is often all about relationships. That is how you get things done.”

That answer immediately established the central theme of our discussion. For Colonel Gentry, relationships are not simply an element of leadership. They are its foundation. In combat, trust is not merely a desirable quality. It is often the difference between mission success and catastrophe.

“Particularly in combat, where there is a lot of fog, friction, uncertainty, and fear, if you have developed those relationships with your fellow Marines, your subordinates, and your superiors, you know their intent. You know what they are thinking, and you have built that trust where you totally rely on the person to the left and right of you. Those relationships are absolutely critical in the heat of combat.”

To illustrate the point, Gentry described something as routine as an infantry patrol moving through an urban environment.

“When you are on patrol, particularly in an urban environment, say you are walking down a street and you have two staggered columns. I am left-handed, so I am typically on the right side of the patrol because that is my stronger shooting hand. I am responsible for my sector. My sector is that right flank. It is up, down, straight across, and everything in between.”

“But I am totally reliant on the Marine on my left flank because he or she is watching that sector and making sure any threats are identified and eliminated. Then we are both reliant on the Marines in the rear to make sure nobody sneaks up on us.”

“That is just a very basic example of how relationships are incredibly important.”

Those relationships, he explained, cannot be improvised once the shooting starts. They must be built long before combat through realistic, demanding training.

“You develop those skills through relationships and through realistic training. It should be realistic and stressful training.”

One example has remained with him throughout his career.

Before deploying to Iraq, 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines partnered with Stu Segall Studios in San Diego to construct a highly realistic Iraqi village complete with movie-quality special effects.

“They had an RPG on a wire that came down and exploded with fake rock and debris. They even had a role player who was an amputee hidden nearby. When the explosion went off, he was dressed in Marine utilities, and he came out of the hiding position with a blood pack on his stump that was spurting blood.”

The objective was not to shock Marines for its own sake. It was to expose them to the chaos of combat in an environment where mistakes became lessons rather than casualties.

“If people can make decisions in those stressful training situations, then when they encounter that stress in combat, they have been inoculated against it. The stress does not overwhelm them.”

“They are able to look at a situation and say, ‘In training, we went left, but in this situation, we really need to go right.’ They are not overwhelmed by that stress.”

Stress itself, Gentry explained, is not necessarily the enemy. Managed properly, it can sharpen performance.

“Stress can be good up to a point. Everybody has been in a stressful situation and experienced it. Your eyesight becomes a little more acute. Your hearing becomes better. You become stronger because all these chemicals are pulsing through your body. That is when you are at your peak.”

But every person has a breaking point.

“There is a point where it becomes overwhelming. When that stress overwhelms a human being, their vision starts tunneling and their hearing starts getting muffled.”

“That is when Marines freeze up. In the worst cases, that is when people become cowards.”

Understanding how individuals respond under pressure naturally led our conversation toward human behavior, credibility, and intelligence.

Although Colonel Gentry did not personally recruit confidential human sources, he relied heavily on the counterintelligence Marines who did.

“Our counterintelligence Marines are the ones who develop sources, and they are very good at developing and vetting them.”

He emphasized that every source, regardless of background, brings personal motivations.

“In terms of vetting, everybody has an agenda.”

The responsibility for recognizing those motivations begins with the individual sitting across from the source.

“The first line of defense has to be the person who is dealing with that other person. That is true in normal relationships as well.”

Then came perhaps the most memorable observation of the interview.

“Every Marine officer is an amateur psychologist, or ought to be, and should be a student of human nature.”

That philosophy extends well beyond intelligence operations. Gentry believes effective leaders must become skilled at distinguishing truth from deception rather than dismissing conflicting accounts as unknowable.

“It used to bug me, and it still bugs me, when I hear people say, ‘It’s a he-said, she-said situation. We cannot figure it out because they are saying two different things.’”

“No. You need to learn how to identify who is telling the truth, who is not, and where the truth may be between the two.”

Body language, he explained, is only one part of that assessment.

“Body language is part of it, but it is also understanding the person. What has their past behavior been? Is there something in their past behavior that is a clue that they are being disingenuous? Are they truthful? Is this behavior consistent with something else you have seen?”

“That is a means of vetting a human source.”

Even then, human intelligence should never stand alone.

“We are very much into all-source intelligence. Human intelligence is one part of it. It is probably the most difficult part because you have to have somebody in the right position, and in combat that is difficult.”

“You can be among the people. You can conduct key-leader engagements and gather information that way. I have done some of that, but not in what you would call a human-source role.”

“Then you want to vet it against signals intelligence, imagery intelligence, and everything else.”

That all-source approach became critical in the preparation for the Second Battle of Fallujah.

“We were receiving human-intelligence reports, but we were also doing extensive UAV coverage of Fallujah before the battle, along with signals intelligence.”

“By pulling those sources together, we were able to determine where the enemy was located and where the enemy had key command-and-control nodes. That allowed us to strike targets before the battle to reduce the enemy’s effectiveness.”

The challenge was not merely identifying targets. Commanders had to establish that those targets were legitimate while protecting civilians as much as possible.

“We had a challenge with our higher headquarters because they wanted to be absolutely certain that we were not hitting nonmilitary targets, and I applaud that.”

“You would send up a target package and say, ‘This is a command-and-control node.’ They would ask, ‘How do you know there are no women and children in the building?’”

“We never knew with one hundred percent certainty. But we could say that in the week we had been observing it, we had not seen a single child or woman enter or leave the building. We saw men in guard-post positions around the building. We saw them being relieved at certain times. We saw people coming out and checking on them.”

“Everything indicated that it was a legitimate military target.”

These decisions placed enormous pressure upon those responsible for evaluating and acting upon intelligence. Reports were arriving from multiple sources. Marines were in contact with the enemy. Decisions had to be made quickly, despite the possibility that a single error could cost innocent lives, Marine lives, or both.

Gentry’s response to that pressure was to become calmer as the environment around him became more chaotic.

“I do not know whether that trait was innate in me or whether it is something I cultivated. I know it is one I have certainly tried to cultivate.”

“When everything gets excited around me, when people get excited, when things get stressful in the combat operations center, when the radios are squawking and you are getting situation reports from troops in contact, I force myself to bring my energy down.”

“It is not so much energy, but I bring a calm to myself.”

“I find that it allows me to keep my head clear, but it also helps reduce the stress around me.”

Then he delivered a line that carried both humor and a serious leadership lesson.

“I have said this somewhat flippantly over the years, but Marine officers do not dash about.”

“It disturbs the Marines.”

The officer’s demeanor influences everyone around him.

“Marine officers should not be dashing around. They should not be frenetic and crazy. They have to remain cool, calm, and collected.”

That does not mean a leader should never display intensity.

“There are times when you have to be really fired up because some people need that swift kick or a little bit of motivation.”

“Motivation is important. I would say we are probably the most motivated service.”

Humor is also inseparable from Marine culture, even in the most serious environments.

“Some of the funniest people I have ever met are United States Marines. They say the funniest things and do the craziest, funniest things.”

He paused before adding the other side of that assessment.

“They have also done some of the stupidest things I have ever seen in my life.”

“But you have to have fun because it is a serious business.”

Humor can emerge even in the middle of an operation, when there is no logical reason to be laughing.

“I remember once we were clearing a building, and I went to force a door open. I put my shoulder into it because I thought the door was going to give quickly.”

“I already had my momentum going because I was going to roll right into the room and pie to the right.”

The door did not open as expected.

“There was a chain on it.”

“I pushed it open, the door snapped back, and it slapped me in the face.”

Even in that moment, his mind registered the absurdity.

“At the time, I remember thinking, ‘That is funny.’”

“When I look back on it, I had the presence of mind to recognize that it was funny. It is still funny to me.”

The stakes were far higher during another operation in Fallujah, when a patrol from 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines was ambushed.

“We had a patrol from 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines get ambushed. The lieutenant was killed. Marines were killed, and several others were wounded.”

The enemy occupied what Gentry described as essentially a block of houses. Clearing those structures one room at a time would have exposed additional Marines to lethal danger.

“We made the decision that instead of risking more Marines by clearing it room by room, we called in a fast mover and dropped a 500-pound bomb on it.”

The prescribed distance from a bomb of that size was far greater than the distance separating the Marines from the target.

“That is when I learned how close you can get to a 500-pound bomb in a city.”

“Usually, they say 600 meters. I think we were about 100 or 150 meters away when it hit.”

They had some protection from the surrounding structures, but the explosion was still close enough for Gentry to remember its physical force more than two decades later.

What he does not remember is the sound.

“I do not even remember it being loud.”

“I do not remember the noise. I just remember the feeling, the overpressure, and the debris.”

“Memory is a strange thing sometimes. That is one of those moments where I know it had to have been loud, but I do not remember it being loud.”

The way people remember the same event differently became even more apparent during another incident in Fallujah involving his battle buddy, Sergeant Shin.

“I was with my battle buddy, Sergeant Shinn, and we were patrolling. We were crossing an intersection, and he was in front of me.”

“Suddenly, a machine gun opened up, and the rounds were ricocheting in front of him.”

Both men immediately moved backward toward cover.

“We were both backing up very quickly, and we pulled back behind the building.”

An amphibious assault vehicle was nearby, offering them a way to cross the exposed intersection.

“Later, there was an Amtrac nearby. We knocked on the hatch and asked, ‘Can you screen us as we cross this intersection so we can get to the other side?’”

What remained most striking was the difference between Gentry’s memory and Sergeant Shinn’s.

“I just remember both of us backing up very quickly.”

“He remembers me grabbing his flak jacket and pulling him back.”

“I have no memory of that.”

The action had likely come from training and instinct rather than conscious deliberation.

The experience occurred during Operation Phantom Fury, the codename for the Second Battle of Fallujah, one of the most intense urban battles fought during Operation Iraqi Freedom. The broader conflict has remained the subject of enduring historical debate. The Bush administration’s case for invading Iraq centered largely on intelligence assessments that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, claims that were later found to be unsupported. Against that backdrop, Gentry separates his assessment into two distinct perspectives.

“There are two answers to that question.”

One is geopolitical.

“If I look at it geopolitically, the whole reason we went in there was fabricated. What did we really accomplish?”

“From a geopolitical standpoint, part of me asks, ‘Was it worth it at all?’”

“Why did we spend that much money, blood, and treasure?”

The second answer comes from the Marine and the human being who served beside men displaying extraordinary courage.

“The Marine part of me, the human part of me, is absolutely honored to have served with Marines like that.”

“I saw acts of bravery on a regular basis.”

“I saw Marines always going toward the sound of gunfire.”

“I saw them do incredible things day after day, getting up and clearing another building.”

“They had lost fellow Marines. Marines had been wounded. They just kept doing it, day after day after day.”

“It is hard not to be inspired by having served with people like that.”

There was also an intensity that could not be reproduced in ordinary life.

“It was thrilling.”

“It was absolutely thrilling.”

Gentry connected that sensation to the title of W. Somerset Maugham’s novel, The Razor’s Edge.

“I truly believe there is a thrill to living on the razor’s edge that you cannot get any other way.”

That thrill creates another danger after Marines return home.

“Unfortunately, that is why Marines sometimes do really reckless things when they come back. They are trying to recapture that feeling.”

He illustrated the point through the story of Marine Captain Stephen Pless, who was awarded the Medal of Honor for his actions in Vietnam.

“Captain Stephen Pless was flying a Huey and serving as an escort for medevac missions in the Republic of Korea Marine zone. It was a relatively quiet zone.”

“They received a distress call from an Army unit. A CH-47 had landed because of mechanical problems. Four members of the crew got out to inspect the aircraft.”

“The aircraft came under fire, and the pilot pulled out, leaving four soldiers in the zone.”

Pless heard the call and made an immediate decision.

“He made the decision to disobey orders. He broke from his escort role and flew to rescue those soldiers.”

“He flew over the zone, assessed the situation, fired guns and rockets, and then landed the helicopter to help shield the soldiers who were being overwhelmed.”

“His two crewmen and his copilot got out. They pulled three of the four soldiers into the aircraft. The fourth soldier was clearly dead at that point.”

The helicopter was now overloaded, and it was positioned near the water.

“He took off, but he was overweight.”

“One of the crewmen said they hit the water several times before he was able to get enough lift to return to an airfield, land, and get the soldiers into a hospital.”

“That crewman said it was the finest bit of airmanship he had seen during his entire tour in Vietnam.”

Pless survived the war, only to die after returning home.

“Afterward, Pless came home and died trying to jump a drawbridge on a motorcycle. He did not make it.”

For Gentry, the story represented an extreme example of someone trying to recreate an intensity that ordinary life could no longer provide.

“That is an extreme example of a Marine trying to recapture the thrill of combat, the thrill of living on the razor’s edge.”

Then, without embellishment, he acknowledged something many combat veterans struggle to express.

“I miss it.”

He did not say that he missed death, destruction, or losing Marines. He missed the intensity, the purpose, and the extraordinary bond created when people depended completely upon one another.

From the Battlefield to the Pentagon, Speaking Truth to Power

For most Marines, a career is measured by deployments, commands, and promotions. For Colonel Keil Gentry, those milestones were certainly significant, but they were never the end goal. Each assignment became another opportunity to lead people, build trust, and prepare the next generation.

I asked him what it was like to spend years investing in Marines, forging relationships through shared hardship, only to leave one command and begin again somewhere else.

His answer reflected the perspective of someone who had lived the rhythm of military life for decades.

“I’ve never actually looked at it that way because that’s just the normal course of a career. If you stay in the Marine Corps for a full career, moving from unit to unit is simply part of the profession.”

Although commands changed, the relationships never completely disappeared.

“Some of those folks I still have relationships with. I still communicate with them. Others it’s much more sporadic. There are reunions where we get together and tell stories.”

More importantly, there is a bond that never truly fades.

“There’s such a common bond amongst Marines to start with, but really amongst all veterans. You immediately have that connection.”

That connection can appear almost anywhere.

“It can be somebody at work or somebody sitting next to you at a brewery.”

One experience with General James Mattis reminded him just how powerful those shared experiences remain.

“General Mattis came to a dinner one night and then an awards event the next day. I spoke with him the evening before and then we sat at the same table during the awards gala.”

Although Mattis had commanded an entire Marine division during the Iraq War while Gentry served much farther down the chain of command, rank disappeared as the conversation turned toward shared experience.

“We just started talking about our time together in Iraq. He had his perspective. I had mine.”

The conversation stayed with him long after it ended.

“Frankly, I’d forgotten how much I missed talking to people with that shared experience.”

“I felt so great during the conversation and afterwards.”

“It was almost an afterglow that stayed with me for days.”

That appreciation for shared experience eventually carried him into one of the Marine Corps’ most influential strategic assignments.

As Deputy Legislative Assistant to the Commandant of the Marine Corps, Gentry’s role was often misunderstood.

Rather than serving as the Marine Corps’ primary liaison to Congress, he focused on developing strategy and advising senior leadership.

“The Legislative Assistant was a one-star general. I was his deputy as a colonel.”

“We also had one colonel covering the Senate and another covering the House.”

Those officers maintained the day-to-day relationships with members of Congress.

Gentry’s responsibility was different.

“My role was keeping everything running.”

“I developed our engagement strategy.”

“What Marine Corps issues are most important? Which member of Congress is best positioned to help us? How does that member prefer to receive information? How do we best engage that person?”

He chuckled as he summarized the assignment.

“That was the mental heavy lifting.”

“The rest was just keeping the trains running on time.”

Earlier, while serving as Head of National Plans at Headquarters Marine Corps, he found himself briefing issues that would ultimately reach the highest levels of government.

One of those involved planning the transition from Iraq back to Afghanistan.

“Probably the most rewarding thing I did there was preparing General Conway for a meeting in what they call ‘the Tank.’”

“The Tank” is the secure conference room inside the Pentagon where the Joint Chiefs of Staff meet to discuss the nation’s most important military issues.

“It isn’t actually a tank. It’s just what they call the room.”

Preparing the Commandant meant far more than assembling briefing slides.

“We were discussing the transition from Iraq back to Afghanistan.”

“It was really more of a strategic planning issue.”

Gentry found himself sitting across from another colonel while a brigadier general remained mostly silent.

“Most of the briefing came from me and a little from the other colonel because I was the plans guy and he was the operations guy.”

The information developed in that room would soon be discussed by the Joint Chiefs and the President of the United States.

Years later, while serving as Director of the Marine Corps War College, another conversation reinforced just how significant the role of a Marine colonel truly is.

Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Peter Pace had come to speak with the students.

During a break, Gentry asked him a simple question.

“Can you talk to the students about the role of a colonel?”

General Pace immediately agreed.

When he returned to the classroom, he offered an observation that Gentry has never forgotten.

“He said that when he was a colonel briefing a general officer, he assumed that if he missed something, the general would catch it.”

Then he described what changed after he became a general.

“When I became a general and a colonel briefed me, I assumed everything he said came from the burning bush.”

The room laughed.

But the lesson was profound.

For Gentry, that perfectly captured the responsibility entrusted to Marine colonels.

“I’d already learned that when you speak as a colonel, you speak for the Marine Corps.”

“You don’t speculate.”

“If you’re giving your opinion, you make it very clear that’s your opinion.”

“Otherwise, when a colonel speaks, people assume what you’re saying is fact.”

He wanted his War College students to hear that lesson from someone who had occupied the highest military position in the United States.

“I was thankful they heard it from him instead of just hearing me tell them how a colonel should act.”

That responsibility becomes even more significant because promotion beyond colonel is extraordinarily rare.

“Colonels are special in the Marine Corps.”

“We refer to them as the senators of the Marine Corps.”

By the time an officer reaches that rank, success has almost become routine.

“Most colonels think, ‘I’ve made every school. I’ve commanded a battalion. I could be a general.’”

Then reality intervenes.

“Only about two and a half percent are selected.”

For many officers, that first non-selection is devastating.

“That’s a gut punch.”

Some retire before ever facing it.

Others retire immediately afterward.

Those who remain generally fall into one of two groups.

“Some become bitter.”

Then he laughed.

“There aren’t many of those.”

The other group becomes something else entirely.

“They realize they’re probably not getting promoted.”

“They don’t have to play the game anymore.”

That freedom creates one of the most valuable leadership qualities in any institution.

“They’re able to speak truth to power.”

Gentry remained a colonel for nearly nine years, an unusually long period in a thirty-year career.

Looking back, he views those years not as a disappointment, but as one of the most meaningful chapters of his service.

The freedom to offer candid, honest advice without worrying about the next promotion allowed him to focus entirely on what was best for the Marine Corps.

It was the same leadership philosophy he had carried from Fallujah to the Pentagon.

Know your people.

Earn their trust.

Remain calm under pressure.

Tell the truth.

And when the moment comes to advise those above you, speak with the integrity that the rank demands.

That philosophy would ultimately lead Colonel Gentry to what may be his most enduring assignment, preserving the history and legacy of the United States Marine Corps itself.

The Museum, Immortality, and the Legacy of the Marine Corps

By the time our conversation turned to the National Museum of the Marine Corps, it became obvious that Colonel Gentry does not view this assignment as retirement.

He views it as another command.

Only now, instead of leading Marines into combat, he is leading the preservation of everything they fought for.

His passion for history is unmistakable, but he was quick to explain that the museum is far more than a collection of artifacts.

It has a mission.

In fact, it has four.

“I think it’s incredibly important. Legacy is so important to who we are as Marines.”

“We stand on the shoulders of those who came before us.”

Those stories, he explained, are what shape every generation that follows.

Whether it is Sergeant Major Dan Daly shouting, “Come on, you sons of bitches, do you want to live forever?”

Whether it is Chesty Puller, surrounded by overwhelming Chinese forces during the Chosin Reservoir campaign, calmly remarking,

“That simplifies the problem. We can attack in any direction.”

Or whether it is Hector Cafferata, throwing Chinese grenades back at the enemy and eventually batting them away with his entrenching tool.

Those stories are not mythology.

They are leadership lessons.

They are reminders of what Marines are capable of under impossible circumstances.

For Colonel Gentry, preserving those stories is preserving the Corps itself.

“At the National Museum of the Marine Corps we really do four things.”

He paused before carefully listing each one.

“We honor those who served before us.”

“We revitalize the spirit of those currently serving.”

“We inspire young men and women to become the next generation of Marines.”

“And we bridge the civilian-military gap.”

Those four principles guide every decision the museum makes.

Honoring Those Who Served

The first mission is perhaps the most obvious.

Honor.

But Gentry explained that honoring Marines is much more than displaying uniforms and medals.

It is preserving memory.

It is ensuring sacrifice is never forgotten.

One thought, in particular, has stayed with him.

“They say you die twice.”

“You die when you take your last breath.”

“You die a second time when the last person says your name for the last time.”

Then he chuckled.

“I truly believe that because we honor those who served before us, all Marines become immortal.”

It is one of the most profound observations of our conversation.

The museum is not simply preserving history.

It is extending life through remembrance.

Every exhibit. Every artifact. Every story. Every name.

Each one prevents that second death.

“They might not say that Marine’s individual name forever.”

“But that person was a Marine.”

“And they live forever in the National Museum of the Marine Corps.”

Revitalizing Those Still Serving

The museum also serves today’s Marines.

Not simply as visitors.

As Marines.

“Marine Corps life is stressful.”

Whether the burden is deployments, paperwork, difficult leaders, or simply the demands of military service, Marines occasionally need to remember why they joined.

That is one of the museum’s primary purposes.

“My goal is that when Marines come here, they get revitalized.”

“They get re-inspired.”

“They leave saying, ‘Oh yeah...this is why I joined the Marine Corps.’”

The museum has another unique quality.

It is alive.

“It’s a living museum.”

Promotion ceremonies. Retirements. Weddings. Christenings. Funerals.

The museum becomes part of a Marine’s entire life.

“We’re truly cradle to grave.”

One of his favorite moments occurs almost every week.

Visitors will notice a promotion ceremony taking place inside the Leatherneck Gallery.

They’ll walk over and quietly ask,

“Are we allowed to watch?”

His answer is always the same.

“Absolutely.”

The next question inevitably follows.

“What are they doing?”

For Gentry, that becomes an opportunity.

Not simply to explain military customs.

But to teach civics.

“They’re going to read that officer’s commission.”

“That’s what gives that officer the authority to give orders.”

Then they reaffirm something larger.

“They reaffirm their oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”

He believes many Americans misunderstand what military officers actually swear allegiance to.

“We’re not swearing allegiance to a piece of paper.”

“We’re swearing allegiance to the concept of who we are as Americans.”

“To the Constitution.”

“We’re not swearing fealty to a king.”

“We’re swearing to the people.”

That distinction matters.

Especially in today’s world.

Bridging the Civilian-Military Divide

For many Americans, military service has become increasingly distant.

Fewer families have direct connections to those who serve.

Colonel Gentry believes that distance is dangerous.

“So many people today haven’t served and don’t know someone who has.”

The museum helps close that gap.

Not through politics.

Through education.

When Americans understand what military service actually costs, they become better citizens.

“When our country’s leaders decide to go to war, the American people should understand the cost.”

“They should understand the human cost.”

Only then can citizens make informed decisions.

History becomes more than something remembered.

It becomes something that informs the future.

Inspiring the Next Generation

The final mission looks decades ahead.

Recruiting.

But not in the traditional sense.

Marine recruiters focus on seventeen and eighteen-year-olds.

Colonel Gentry starts much earlier.

“I play the long game.”

School children visit every day.

Elementary students.

Middle school students.

High school students.

Many leave inspired.

He laughed before describing what he hopes they are thinking as they walk toward the parking lot.

The museum also keeps active-duty Marines on staff.

Their mission extends beyond maintaining exhibits. They mentor. They answer questions.

They become living examples of what today’s Marine looks like.

“Not everybody can be a Marine.”

“Not everybody should be a Marine.”

“But I want more young people to want to become Marines so that we can choose the very best.”

Every program. Every exhibit. Every event. Every conversation.

Supports one or more of those four missions.

If it does not...

It does not happen.

“Everything we do contributes to one or more of those four tenets.”

“If it doesn’t...”

“We just don’t do it.”

A Final Reflection

After nearly thirty years in uniform, after leading Marines in Fallujah, shaping national strategy inside the Pentagon, educating future commanders at the Marine Corps War College, and now preserving the Corps’ history, Colonel Keil Gentry’s mission has remained remarkably consistent.

Build trust.

Lead with humility.

Study people.

Remain calm under pressure.

Honor those who came before you.

Inspire those who will follow.

And NEVER allow the sacrifices of Marines to be forgotten.

If leadership is ultimately measured not by rank, but by the lives influenced and the legacy left behind, Colonel Keil Gentry’s greatest command may not have been on the battlefield at all.

It may very well be ensuring that every Marine who came before him is remembered by every Marine who comes after.

If you haven’t already made plans to visit, I highly encourage you to do so. Located adjacent to Marine Corps Base Quantico in Triangle, Virginia, the National Museum of the Marine Corps is a world-class tribute to the history, sacrifice, and enduring legacy of the United States Marine Corps. Click the link below to visit the museum’s website and help preserve that legacy.

https://www.usmcmuseum.com/

A Legacy That Will Endure

Billy Waugh’s career cannot be measured solely by medals, missions, or years of service. While his decorations place him among the most highly honored Special Forces soldiers in American history, his true legacy lies in the influence he had on generations of operators who followed him. The tactics he helped pioneer continue to be taught, the standards he lived by continue to shape the culture of Special Forces, and the intelligence operations in which he participated helped redefine how the United States confronts emerging threats around the world.

From the jungles of Vietnam to the mountains of Afghanistan, Billy Waugh spent more than five decades serving in America’s most dangerous and secretive missions, leaving behind a legacy that helped define modern Special Operations and clandestine intelligence.

There are soldiers whose careers become the subject of history books.

Then there are men like Billy Waugh, whose careers helped shape history itself.

Long before the names Delta Force, SEAL Team Six, and the CIA’s Special Activities Center became familiar to the American public, Billy Waugh was quietly carrying out missions that would define the modern era of unconventional warfare. His remarkable career stretched from the Korean War and Vietnam through the Cold War and into the Global War on Terror. Along the way, he became one of the most decorated Green Berets in American history, a legendary Central Intelligence Agency operative, and one of the last members of a generation that built America’s modern Special Operations capability from the ground up.

To the public, Billy Waugh was largely unknown. Within the Special Forces and intelligence communities, however, he was a legend. His name became synonymous with courage, innovation, humility, and an unwavering commitment to the mission. For more than fifty years, he served in places few Americans knew existed, often performing missions that remain classified to this day. His story is one of extraordinary sacrifice and quiet professionalism, qualities that continue to define America’s elite military and intelligence operators.

A Young Texan Who Wanted to Serve

Born in Bastrop, Texas, on December 1, 1929, Billy Waugh dreamed of military service from an early age. During World War II, while still only fifteen years old, he attempted to enlist in the Marine Corps by hitchhiking to California, believing he could somehow overcome the military’s age requirements. The attempt failed, but it demonstrated a determination that would define the rest of his life.

In 1948, shortly after turning eighteen, Waugh enlisted in the US Army . Following airborne training and service during the Korean War, he volunteered for one of the Army’s newest and least understood organizations. In 1954, he earned the coveted Green Beret and joined the 10th Special Forces Group. At the time, Special Forces was still developing its doctrine of unconventional warfare, guerrilla operations, foreign internal defense, and strategic reconnaissance. Waugh entered the organization at its beginning and would help shape its future.

Vietnam and the Birth of a Legend

Billy Waugh’s reputation was forged during the Vietnam War, where he served with the 5th Special Forces Group before becoming involved with the highly classified Military Assistance Command, Vietnam Studies and Observations Group, better known as MACV SOG. The organization conducted covert operations deep inside Laos and Cambodia, gathering intelligence, directing air strikes, rescuing prisoners, sabotaging enemy supply lines, and monitoring North Vietnamese troop movements in places where American forces officially were not operating.

The missions carried extraordinary risks. Small reconnaissance teams often found themselves isolated hundreds of miles behind enemy lines with little chance of immediate rescue. Casualty rates were among the highest of any American unit during the war, yet volunteers continued to step forward because they understood the strategic importance of the intelligence they collected.

One of Waugh’s defining moments came in November 1965 during a nineteen hour battle near Bong Son. Leading his Special Forces detachment against overwhelming enemy forces, Waugh was struck repeatedly by enemy fire. Bullets tore through his foot, ankle, knee, and body, yet he refused evacuation until every member of his team had been accounted for and the fighting had concluded. His determination to remain in command despite multiple gunshot wounds became one of the defining stories of Special Forces history.

Rather than ending his military career, the battle only strengthened his reputation. Waugh recovered and returned to combat, continuing to lead dangerous missions throughout Vietnam. By the conclusion of his Army service, he had earned eight Purple Hearts, the Silver Star, four Bronze Stars with Valor, fourteen Air Medals, multiple Army Commendation Medals with Valor, and numerous foreign decorations. His extraordinary collection of awards reflected not one act of bravery, but a career defined by repeated acts of courage under fire.

A Pioneer of Modern Special Operations

Billy Waugh was more than an exceptional combat leader. He was also one of the pioneers who helped transform Special Operations into the highly sophisticated force it is today. Throughout his career, he consistently embraced innovation, understanding that success in unconventional warfare depended upon adapting faster than the enemy.

Among his many accomplishments was participating in America’s first operational High Altitude Low Opening parachute insertion. HALO operations allowed Special Operations personnel to infiltrate denied territory from extremely high altitudes while remaining virtually undetectable. The technique would eventually become one of the defining capabilities of elite military units throughout the world, but Waugh belonged to the generation that proved it could be accomplished under operational conditions.

His willingness to embrace new methods reflected the broader philosophy of Special Forces itself. Success depended not on overwhelming firepower, but on creativity, adaptability, discipline, and the ability to solve complex problems in environments where conventional solutions simply did not exist.

A Second Career Inside the CIA

After retiring from the Army in 1972, Waugh briefly worked as a postal carrier. The quiet routines of civilian life, however, never truly suited him. Five years later, he accepted an opportunity to join the Central Intelligence Agency, beginning another remarkable chapter that would span nearly three decades.

Much of Waugh’s work with the Central Intelligence Agency remains classified, but enough has entered the public record to demonstrate the extraordinary trust placed in him. Rather than commanding military formations, he now operated in the shadows as a paramilitary officer conducting surveillance, intelligence collection, counterterrorism operations, and covert missions throughout Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and Asia.

The transition from Green Beret to CIA operative felt almost seamless. The patience, discipline, independence, and adaptability that had defined his military service made him ideally suited for clandestine work, where success depended upon remaining unnoticed while collecting information that could influence national security decisions.

Hunting Carlos the Jackal

One of Waugh’s most significant CIA assignments involved tracking the notorious international terrorist known as Carlos the Jackal. Working under deep cover, Waugh conducted long term surveillance operations that documented Carlos’s movements, associates, and routines. The intelligence gathered during these operations ultimately contributed to the effort that resulted in Carlos’s capture in Sudan.

The assignment illustrated the reality of intelligence work, which often bears little resemblance to popular portrayals in film. Success required extraordinary patience, meticulous observation, and the discipline to remain invisible for extended periods. Rather than dramatic gunfights or spectacular action, Waugh’s work consisted of carefully gathering information that could later be used to dismantle terrorist networks.

Watching Osama bin Laden Before the World Knew His Name

Years before September 11, Billy Waugh found himself monitoring another emerging terrorist whose name was virtually unknown to the American public.

His name was Osama bin Laden.

While bin Laden lived in Sudan during the early 1990s, Waugh participated in CIA surveillance operations that closely observed his activities and the expanding network surrounding him. Intelligence officers recognized that bin Laden represented a growing threat years before the attacks that would forever change the course of American history. Waugh later reflected that the danger posed by al Qaeda had become increasingly apparent long before most people had ever heard its name.

The assignment demonstrated one of intelligence work’s greatest challenges. Success often involves recognizing threats years before the public or policymakers fully appreciate their significance. In many ways, Waugh’s surveillance of bin Laden stands as one of the earliest chapters in what would become America’s long war against international terrorism.

Returning to War at Seventy Two

Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Billy Waugh once again volunteered to serve.

He was seventy two years old.

While most Americans his age had long since retired, Waugh deployed to Afghanistan as part of the CIA’s earliest paramilitary teams working alongside the Northern Alliance during the opening campaign against the Taliban and al Qaeda. He celebrated his seventy second birthday while deployed in one of the world’s most dangerous combat zones, proving once again that dedication to service had no expiration date.

For younger Special Forces soldiers and CIA officers arriving in Afghanistan, serving alongside Billy Waugh meant working beside a living piece of military history. His experience stretched back to the earliest days of Special Forces itself, providing a direct link between the pioneers of unconventional warfare and a new generation confronting an entirely different enemy.

The Respect of an Entire Community

When Billy Waugh passed in June 2023 at the age of ninety three, tributes poured in from every corner of the Special Operations and intelligence communities. Senior military leaders, retired CIA officers, and former teammates all described the same qualities that had defined him throughout his life: humility, professionalism, courage, and an unwavering devotion to the mission.

General Bryan Fenton, commander of United States Special Operations Command, praised Waugh’s extraordinary contributions to the Special Operations community and the example he set for generations of service members. Other respected leaders, including Lieutenant General John Mulholland and former CIA paramilitary officer Ric Prado, remembered him not only as an exceptional operator but also as a mentor who willingly shared decades of hard earned experience with younger soldiers and intelligence officers.

Despite his extraordinary accomplishments, Waugh remained remarkably humble. Those who knew him consistently recalled that he preferred discussing the accomplishments of others rather than his own. Recognition never motivated him. Completing the mission and serving his country were always enough.

A Legacy That Will Endure

Billy Waugh’s career cannot be measured solely by medals, missions, or years of service. While his decorations place him among the most highly honored Green Berets in American history, his true legacy lies in the influence he had on generations of operators who followed him. The tactics he helped pioneer continue to be taught, the standards he lived by continue to shape the culture of Special Forces, and the intelligence operations in which he participated helped redefine how the United States confronts emerging threats around the world.

Throughout his remarkable life, Waugh embodied the philosophy that has long defined the Green Berets and the intelligence community’s Quiet Professionals. He never sought publicity, celebrity, or personal recognition. Instead, he measured success by the completion of the mission, the safety of his teammates, and the knowledge that he had served his country to the very best of his ability. Those who worked alongside him consistently described him as humble, approachable, and entirely focused on the job rather than his own accomplishments.

His influence extended far beyond the battlefield. Young Green Berets, CIA paramilitary officers, and Special Operations leaders viewed him as a living bridge between generations of unconventional warfare. From the earliest days of the Cold War through Vietnam, the rise of international terrorism, and the opening campaigns in Afghanistan, Waugh carried with him decades of operational knowledge that few others could match. He willingly shared those lessons with younger operators, ensuring that the hard earned experience of one generation would strengthen the next.

As America remembers Billy Waugh, it remembers far more than an extraordinary soldier or intelligence officer. It remembers one of the last representatives of a generation that quietly shaped the nation’s most elite military and intelligence organizations without ever asking for recognition. Billy Waugh spent more than half a century defending the United States through wars, covert operations, and some of the most dangerous missions ever undertaken by American forces. Long after the details of many of his operations have faded into history or remain classified, the example he set through courage, humility, perseverance, and unwavering service will continue to inspire generations of Green Berets, intelligence officers, and Quiet Professionals who choose to serve not for recognition, but for the mission.

On April 7, 1994, Federal Express Flight 705 lifted off from Memphis International Airport carrying more than 100,000 pounds of cargo and approximately 85,000 pounds of fuel for the flight to San Jose, California. At the controls were Captain David Sanders, First Officer James Tucker, and Flight Engineer Andy Peterson, three experienced aviators who expected an ordinary afternoon.

Instead, they found themselves fighting for their lives.

Sitting in the jump seat behind the cockpit was Auburn Calloway, a fellow FedEx flight engineer traveling as a deadheading employee. His guitar case did not contain a guitar. Investigators later determined it held multiple hammers and a spear gun. According to prosecutors, Calloway believed he was about to be terminated for falsifying flight hours and intended to kill the crew before deliberately crashing the aircraft into the FedEx hub in Memphis. His motive was chillingly calculated. By disguising the attack as an accident, he believed his family would receive roughly $2.5 million in life insurance benefits.

His planning had already begun before the aircraft left the gate.

As the crew completed their preflight checks, Flight Engineer Andy Peterson noticed that the cockpit voice recorder had been switched off after its circuit breaker had been pulled. Assuming it had simply been overlooked during preparations, Peterson restored power. That single action unknowingly preserved the evidence that would later reveal exactly what happened inside the cockpit. Investigators concluded that Calloway had attempted to disable the recorder so the struggle would be erased during the recorder’s thirty minute recording loop after the planned crash.

Twenty six minutes after takeoff, while climbing through approximately 19,000 feet, Calloway opened the guitar case.

He attacked.

Without warning, he struck Peterson, Tucker, and Sanders repeatedly with hammers, fracturing skulls and causing catastrophic head injuries. Peterson’s temporal artery was severed. Tucker suffered skull fractures that drove bone fragments into his brain, temporarily paralyzing part of his body. Sanders was also struck multiple times in the head. Despite those injuries, all three men remained conscious.

When the initial assault paused, Calloway retrieved the spear gun and ordered the crew back into their seats.

They refused.

What happened next remains one of the most extraordinary examples of crew resource management and adaptive leadership in aviation history.

Barely able to see and losing function on one side of his body, First Officer Jim Tucker realized the airplane itself could become a weapon against the attacker. He abruptly pitched and rolled the fully loaded DC 10 through violent maneuvers that approached the structural limits of the aircraft. At one point, the airplane rolled to approximately 140 degrees of bank, nearly upside down, before entering a steep dive. The extreme forces threw Calloway off balance and repeatedly slammed everyone inside the cockpit and galley against the aircraft’s interior.

Those maneuvers bought the crew precious seconds.

Sanders and Peterson used the opportunity to wrestle with Calloway while Tucker continued flying the damaged aircraft. Eventually, Sanders resumed control of the airplane as Tucker joined Peterson in subduing their attacker. Despite multiple severe head injuries, massive blood loss, and rapidly deteriorating physical condition, the three pilots refused to surrender control of their aircraft.

Returning to Memphis presented another challenge.

The DC 10 was still carrying nearly all of its fuel. There was no time to dump weight. Sanders requested the airport’s longer runway and flew an aggressive approach while ignoring repeated terrain warnings because there was no safer alternative. The aircraft landed safely approximately 16,000 kilograms above its certified maximum landing weight, another extraordinary feat given the condition of both the airplane and its crew. Emergency responders entered a cockpit covered in blood.

All three pilots survived.

None of them ever returned to commercial flying.

Calloway survived as well. He was convicted of attempted air piracy and attempted murder. His insanity defense failed, and he received two consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole. Today, more than three decades later, the 74 year old remains incarcerated at USP Coleman I in Florida, where he is expected to spend the rest of his life.

The Human Intelligence Lesson

Flight 705 is often remembered as an aviation story.

It is equally a human intelligence story.

Calloway exploited trust, familiarity, and routine. He was not an unknown hijacker forcing his way aboard. He was a respected employee, a former Navy pilot, and someone the crew had no reason to suspect. His greatest weapon was not the hammer. It was the assumption that someone who belonged could not become the threat.

The crew’s response demonstrates another lesson entirely.

Under unimaginable stress, leadership became fluid. Roles shifted naturally. Communication remained purposeful despite catastrophic injuries. Tucker used the aircraft itself as a defensive tool. Peterson recognized the significance of the cockpit voice recorder before the attack even began. Sanders made the final landing while critically injured.

Three men, working together under conditions that should have made coordinated action impossible, prevented one of the deadliest acts of aviation sabotage in American history.

That is what exceptional human performance under pressure looks like.

On the evening of September 23, 1989, a group of Crips gang members launched what they believed would be a routine drive-by shooting against a house in Tacoma, Washington’s notorious Hilltop neighborhood. Instead, they found themselves exchanging gunfire with nearly a dozen off duty U.S. Army Rangers from the 2nd Ranger Battalion stationed at nearby Fort Lewis.

The confrontation, now remembered as the Ash Street Shootout, has become one of the most extraordinary and unlikely gunfights in modern American history. Hundreds of rounds were fired during the battle, yet remarkably, no one was killed. The incident quickly became national news and has since earned a place in both military and law enforcement history.

The story begins with Staff Sergeant Bill Foulk, who had purchased a modest home on Ash Street as an investment property. At the time, Tacoma’s Hilltop neighborhood had become one of the Pacific Northwest’s most dangerous areas. The crack cocaine epidemic had fueled an explosion of gang violence, and the Hilltop Crips exercised significant control over the surrounding streets through intimidation, narcotics trafficking, and frequent acts of violence.

As the neighborhood deteriorated, Foulk became increasingly frustrated by the criminal activity taking place directly across from his home. According to accounts of the incident, he began documenting the constant traffic at a nearby suspected drug house, recording visitors and observing activity that appeared consistent with street-level narcotics distribution. His efforts did not go unnoticed. Members of the gang soon realized they were being watched, and tensions escalated.

Recognizing that retaliation was becoming increasingly likely, Foulk invited several fellow Rangers to his home for what outwardly appeared to be a casual social gathering. Many of the soldiers brought personally owned firearms, an ordinary practice for military personnel spending an evening together at a private residence. None of them anticipated how quickly those weapons would become necessary.

Later that evening, a caravan of gang members reportedly drove toward the residence and opened fire. Instead of finding an unsuspecting homeowner, they encountered highly trained infantrymen whose profession was responding calmly and decisively under fire. The Rangers immediately returned fire, transforming what had been intended as an ambush into a sustained gun battle that lasted anywhere from ten to thirty minutes, according to various accounts.

Witnesses described hundreds of rounds being exchanged throughout the neighborhood. Miraculously, despite the intensity of the firefight, no fatalities were reported. Several participants and bystanders sustained injuries, and numerous homes and vehicles were damaged, but the incident stopped short of becoming the mass-casualty event it easily could have been.

The aftermath proved almost as significant as the firefight itself. The Ash Street Shootout drew national attention to Tacoma’s growing gang problem and highlighted the deteriorating conditions within the Hilltop neighborhood. Public officials, law enforcement agencies, and community leaders faced increasing pressure to confront the violent street gangs that had been allowed to flourish during the height of the crack cocaine epidemic.

For many residents, the shootout became a turning point. It focused renewed attention on the need for aggressive policing, community involvement, and long-term investment in neighborhoods that had been overwhelmed by gang violence. Over the following years, Tacoma undertook significant efforts to reclaim Hilltop, and while the transformation was gradual, the neighborhood eventually became one of the city’s most notable examples of urban revitalization.

Today, the Ash Street Shootout remains a remarkable chapter in American history because of its sheer improbability. It is difficult to imagine a more unusual confrontation than one in which an elite Army Ranger unit, relaxing at a fellow soldier’s home, suddenly found itself engaged in a prolonged firefight with one of the nation’s most violent street gangs.

The event has become part of US Army Ranger folklore, but it also serves as a reminder of the challenges many American cities faced during the late 1980s. The crack epidemic transformed neighborhoods across the country, empowered violent criminal organizations, and stretched law enforcement resources to their limits. In Tacoma, those realities collided with one of the most disciplined fighting forces in the world, producing an incident unlike any other in modern American history.

Nearly four decades later, the Ash Street Shootout continues to fascinate soldiers, police officers, historians, and students of criminal justice alike. It stands as one of the rare moments when the worlds of military service and domestic street crime collided in spectacular fashion, leaving behind a story that is almost impossible to believe, yet entirely true.

Every successful intelligence recruitment begins with a conversation. Popular culture has conditioned us to imagine clandestine meetings in dimly lit parking garages, secret exchanges inside foreign embassies, or coded messages hidden beneath park benches. The reality is often far less dramatic and considerably more effective. In the digital age, the first approach may arrive as nothing more than a professional networking message from someone who appears to share your interests, admire your experience, or offer an attractive consulting opportunity.

For Kevin Mallory, that first contact came through LinkedIn . A former Central Intelligence Agency case officer with decades of experience in the intelligence community, Mallory appeared to be an unlikely target for a foreign intelligence service. He understood recruitment, had spent years operating in the clandestine world, and knew precisely how hostile intelligence services identified and developed sources. Yet in 2017, according to federal prosecutors, Chinese intelligence officers successfully recruited him through what appeared to be an ordinary professional relationship. The case ultimately resulted in his conviction for transmitting classified national defense information, a 20 year federal prison sentence, and incarceration at ADX Florence, the Federal Bureau of Prisons most secure institution.

The Mallory case deserves attention not simply because of the classified information that was compromised, but because it demonstrates that the fundamental principles of human intelligence have changed very little over time. Technology has evolved, communication platforms have become more sophisticated, and recruitment methods have adapted to the digital age, but the underlying objective remains exactly the same. Successful intelligence officers identify vulnerabilities, establish relationships, earn trust, and gradually persuade another human being to cooperate.

At the time Chinese intelligence officers approached Mallory, he was no longer employed by the CIA. His government career had ended years earlier, but his value had not diminished. Former intelligence officers retain institutional knowledge, professional relationships, operational experience, and an understanding of how their former organizations think and operate. Those qualities make them attractive targets long after they leave government service, particularly if personal circumstances create opportunities for exploitation.

According to evidence presented during his prosecution, Mallory was carrying approximately $230,000 in debt while struggling to establish a private consulting business. Financial hardship alone does not transform someone into a spy, nor should it be viewed as evidence of disloyalty. Thousands of Americans experience financial distress without ever violating the law. Professional intelligence services, however, are not looking for average circumstances. They are looking for pressure points. Debt, career frustration, personal grievances, and professional isolation can all become factors that increase susceptibility to recruitment when carefully assessed by experienced intelligence officers.

The initial contact appeared entirely legitimate. Someone claiming to represent a Chinese think tank reached out through LinkedIn expressing interest in Mallory’s expertise and inviting him to participate in consulting work. Similar messages are received every day by academics, retired military officers, intelligence professionals, diplomats, and executives around the world. That familiarity is precisely what makes the approach effective. Foreign intelligence services rarely announce their intentions. They create an environment in which the target believes the relationship is mutually beneficial before introducing increasingly sensitive requests.

LinkedIn has fundamentally changed the landscape of intelligence targeting. Individuals voluntarily publish detailed employment histories, educational backgrounds, areas of specialization, conference appearances, certifications, career ambitions, and extensive professional networks. What once required months of surveillance, painstaking research, and human reporting can now be assembled in a matter of minutes. For a hostile intelligence service seeking experienced government officials with access to sensitive knowledge, professional networking platforms provide an extraordinarily efficient starting point.

The recruitment itself did not occur overnight. Like virtually every successful human intelligence operation, it developed gradually through a series of interactions that normalized the relationship. According to prosecutors, Mallory traveled to China on multiple occasions where he met with individuals identified as Chinese intelligence officers. He reportedly received approximately $25,000 in compensation and was provided with a specially modified communications device designed to facilitate encrypted exchanges. Each step represented a deeper level of trust, a greater commitment, and a progressively more difficult decision to reverse.

One of the most revealing pieces of evidence introduced during trial was a brief encrypted message attributed to Mallory: “Your object is to gain information, and my object is to be paid.” Those few words stripped away any illusion about the nature of the relationship. There was no ideological manifesto or claim of political principle. Prosecutors argued that the exchange reflected a straightforward transactional relationship in which classified information was exchanged for financial compensation.

Perhaps the most enduring lesson from the Mallory case is that successful intelligence operations are ultimately about understanding people rather than mastering technology. The software changes, communication platforms evolve, and encryption becomes more sophisticated, but the fundamental principles of human intelligence remain remarkably constant. Whether recruiting confidential informants, conducting undercover investigations, cultivating diplomatic sources, or defending against foreign espionage, the central question never changes: What motivates another human being to cooperate?

During my interview with former CIA Operations Officer Bob Dougherty, who spent more than 26 years recruiting and managing human sources around the world, he reminded me that, “HUMINT is critical to discern the plans, intentions, and what is in the hearts and minds of our adversaries.” That observation captures the essence of intelligence work. Satellites can photograph a missile site. Signals intelligence can intercept communications. Artificial intelligence can process enormous amounts of data in seconds. But none of those capabilities can reliably explain why a foreign leader is making a particular decision, what an adversary truly intends to do next, or how internal disagreements are shaping events behind closed doors. Those answers almost always come from people.

Check out the full interview with Bob Dougherty by clicking on the link below:

https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/the-human-intelligence-ledger-7385160618330431489/

Every experienced case officer eventually learns that intelligence collection is, at its core, an exercise in applied psychology. Before a source is recruited, they must first be understood. Their motivations, fears, ambitions, frustrations, and vulnerabilities must be carefully assessed. Only then can an intelligence officer determine whether a relationship is possible and whether that individual possesses both the placement and access to provide information of genuine operational value. Technology may facilitate the initial contact, as it did in the Kevin Mallory case, but it is human behavior that determines whether the operation succeeds.

The irony of the Mallory case is impossible to ignore. Kevin Mallory once spent his career recruiting foreign sources on behalf of the United States. Years later, Chinese intelligence officers applied those very same principles against him. They did not succeed because LinkedIn was a revolutionary tool. They succeeded because they understood the person behind the profile. The platform merely provided the introduction. The recruitment itself was accomplished through timeless human intelligence tradecraft.

There is a common misconception that harassment begins with violence. In reality, it often begins with something much smaller. A text message. A voicemail. An unwanted phone call. Most people dismiss these incidents individually because, standing alone, they rarely appear significant. Yet harassment is seldom defined by a single event. It is defined by repetition, persistence, and the refusal to respect another person’s clearly established boundaries.

For approximately eighteen months, I have experienced what I believe to be precisely that pattern. After repeatedly instructing my mother-in-law, Pamela Peterson, not to contact me under any circumstances, the communications continued. Along the way came multiple police reports, a written cease-and-desist demand, a police-issued trespass advisory, repeated threats involving my federal probation officer, and continued unwanted messages despite every effort to end the contact peacefully.

The question I continue asking is one that extends well beyond my own circumstances.

How many police reports does it take before harassment matters?

More Than a Family Disagreement

Every family experiences conflict. Relationships deteriorate. People argue. None of those realities automatically constitute harassment, nor should they. This article is not about one heated exchange or an isolated disagreement between family members.

Unfortunately, my experience has involved far more than ordinary family conflict. Throughout my marriage, I have repeatedly observed my mother-in-law consume alcohol to the point that she appeared intoxicated, often beginning earlier in the day and continuing into the evening. In my experience, many of the angry late-night text messages, phone calls, and confrontational interactions occurred after she appeared to have been drinking. She has also struggled with gambling, and her history includes multiple DUI convictions. Whether those issues explain her conduct is not for me to say, but they have formed the backdrop to many of the incidents described in this article.

This article, however, is not about alcohol, gambling, or addiction. It is about what happens after someone explicitly communicates, in writing, that they no longer wish to have any contact whatsoever, only to find those requests repeatedly ignored over an extended period of time.

On December 14, 2024, I sent a formal written cease-and-desist message instructing Pamela Peterson not to call me, text me, message me through social media, or contact me for any reason. I made it clear that future unwanted communications would be preserved as evidence of harassment. After sending that notice, I blocked her and believed the matter was over.

It wasn’t.

A Documented Pattern

Less than two weeks later, another message arrived.

She wrote:

“Wow I think I will talk to my FBI agent friend Monday So you can go back to prison where you belong. You are such a fraud.”

Pam was working as a janitor at the FBI’s Minneapolis field office at the time.

That communication resulted in St. Cloud Police Report No. 24095499.

I subsequently contacted that same FBI office and made them aware that Pam was using her position as a janitor at the FBI building to intimidate me.

Over the months that followed, additional unsolicited communications continued. Among the statements I documented were:

“Go back to your prison life Scumbag.”

“You WILL be back in jail soon I’m gonna get you locked up”

“The FBI is coming for you...”

Rather than allowing the past to remain in the past, my previous federal conviction became a recurring subject of unwanted communications. The messages increasingly focused on my criminal history and, more concerningly, my current federal supervised release.

In May 2026, additional communications led to another St. Cloud Police report after threats were made to contact government agencies regarding disability benefits, SNAP assistance, and daycare assistance despite no factual basis ever being identified for those allegations.

Instead of ending, the conduct appeared to escalate.

When Probation Becomes a Weapon

Most people have never lived under federal supervised release. Those who have understand that even baseless allegations can create significant stress because every report must be evaluated.

Throughout this period, my mother-in-law repeatedly referenced contacting my probation officer.

During one incident outside my residence that was captured on video, she stated:

“I can call your probation officer. Anybody can call somebody’s probation officer.”

As the communications continued, she sent additional text messages stating:

“The probation has been contacted.”

She later mocked my supervision, writing:

“3 more years of federal probation... yay!”

She also added:

“Now you are running scared as you should be.”

What I can say is that they were sufficiently concerning that I proactively contacted my United States Probation Officer on several occasions to advise him that he might receive unfounded allegations. No one should feel compelled to warn federal authorities that a family member may attempt to involve them in personal disputes.

The Day It Came to My Front Door

The situation escalated dramatically in July.

After transporting my wife to our residence 3 hours late, Pamela Peterson immediately told me that she was going to report me to my probation officer. It’s her go to threat to me… She then remained outside our home instead of leaving. According to the responding police report and my own video recording, she repeatedly honked her vehicle’s horn and refused to leave despite requests to do so. Multiple witnesses observed the incident.

During that encounter she stated:

“Give me a misdemeanor. I want it.”

When speaking about my probation officer, she again remarked:

“I will call your probation officer and you will go back to prison where you belong.”

Responding officers ultimately intervened, documented the disturbance, and issued a trespass advisory prohibiting her from returning to my property. At the time, I believed that police intervention and a formal trespass notice would finally bring the matter to an end.

Instead, the unwanted communications continued.

“Look Out for Yourself...”

Most recently, despite repeated written demands that she cease all contact, I received another series of unsolicited text messages.

The first read:

“Hey Ben just so you know look out for yourself...”

Moments later came another:

“The probation has been contacted.”

Additional messages followed over the course of the evening.

She mocked my probation.

She suggested I should be afraid.

She referred to my prior incarceration.

She wrote:

“Now you are running scared as you should be.”

Recovering While Defending Myself

These events unfolded during one of the most difficult periods of my life.

Over the past year, I suffered a catastrophic spinal injury that required four separate surgeries. Following those operations, I developed life-threatening complications and nearly lost my life. I remain disabled and continue working through an extensive recovery process.

The Position It Has Placed My Wife In

Perhaps the saddest aspect of this entire situation has been the effect on my wife.

She has repeatedly asked her mother to stop contacting me. Despite those requests, the communications have continued, placing her in the impossible position of watching conflict between her husband and her own family that she has actively tried to prevent. No spouse should have to choose between protecting their marriage and confronting a parent who refuses to respect clearly established boundaries.

The situation has created unnecessary tension during what should have been a joyful period focused on raising our daughter and rebuilding our lives following significant medical hardship.

What the Law Does, and Doesn’t, Address

To be clear, this article is not intended as a criticism of the individual police officers who have responded to these incidents. Every officer I have encountered has treated me professionally, documented the complaints, prepared reports, and explained the legal limitations they operate under.

The challenge lies elsewhere.

Harassment statutes appropriately require a high legal threshold before criminal penalties are imposed. Due process matters, and those protections exist for good reason. Yet victims of persistent unwanted contact often find themselves trapped in an exhausting cycle. They are told to save screenshots, preserve evidence, block phone numbers, send cease-and-desist letters, file police reports, and pursue civil remedies. Each individual incident may appear minor when viewed alone, but together they can fundamentally alter a person’s sense of security and peace.

Harassment is rarely defined by one text message. It is the cumulative effect of dozens of messages, repeated threats, unwanted appearances, and continued contact after someone has unequivocally said, “Leave me alone.”

A Question Worth Asking

I understand why the legal system is cautious. Not every family dispute belongs in a courtroom, and not every unpleasant interaction should become a criminal matter.

At the same time, society should be willing to ask whether the current system adequately protects people who have done everything they have been instructed to do. When someone sends a formal cease-and-desist, repeatedly tells another person to stop contacting them, documents every communication, files multiple police reports, receives a police-issued trespass advisory, warns their probation officer about anticipated false allegations, and still continues receiving unwanted communications, it is reasonable to wonder what additional steps remain before meaningful intervention becomes available.

My Harassment Restraining Order petition will not be based upon one argument or one emotional exchange. It is based upon what I believe is a documented pattern of unwanted conduct that has continued for approximately eighteen months despite repeated efforts to end it peacefully.

Whether the courts ultimately agree with my legal conclusions will be their decision to make. My purpose in writing this article is different. It is to raise a broader public question about how persistent harassment is addressed before it escalates into something even more serious.

Because after months of preserving evidence, involving law enforcement, warning federal authorities, and repeatedly asking to be left alone, I find myself asking the same question that countless others in similar situations have likely asked before me:

How many police reports does it take before harassment matters?

The Brotherhood Behind the Fighter Jet

Every child who has watched an F-16 Fighting Falcon thunder overhead has imagined, if only for a moment, what it must feel like to sit inside that cockpit. The aircraft has become one of the defining symbols of American airpower, capable of breathtaking speed, extraordinary precision, and overwhelming combat capability. To the public, it represents technology at its absolute peak. To aspiring military aviators, it represents a dream.

Very few ever realize that dream.

Fewer still spend more than three decades serving their country while simultaneously building a distinguished civilian aviation career, commanding Airmen during the emergence of the United States Space Force, and ultimately dedicating themselves to mentoring the next generation of leaders.

Lt. Col. James Reeman is one of those individuals.

As publisher of The Human Intelligence Ledger, my conversations have traditionally centered on law enforcement executives, intelligence professionals, military commanders, prosecutors, and correctional leaders. Although their professions differ, they share a common thread: they lead people through uncertainty, make decisions under pressure, and understand that trust is earned long before it is ever tested.

Military aviation belongs in that conversation.

Few professions demand more from their leaders than one where lives depend upon preparation, communication, discipline, and absolute confidence in the people beside you. Those same principles have quietly become the foundation of nearly every interview published in these pages.

That made James Reeman someone I wanted to meet.

Over the course of more than thirty years, Reeman flew the F-16 Fighting Falcon, deployed in support of combat operations during Operation Iraqi Freedom, commanded an Air National Guard organization supporting one of the nation’s earliest offensive space missions as the Space Force emerged, and simultaneously built a successful career as an airline captain. Today, he continues serving the aviation community through FastJetFriday, his free weekly newsletter dedicated to mentoring aspiring aviators, sharing leadership lessons, and helping others navigate careers in both military and civilian aviation.

Given that résumé, I expected our conversation to revolve around airplanes.

Instead, James Reeman spent most of our interview talking about people.

Before discussing combat, the Space Force, or even the F-16 itself, he spoke about relationships, culture, and the unique bond that develops among individuals whose lives ultimately depend upon one another. The longer we talked, the more obvious it became that while the public often romanticizes fighter aircraft, fighter pilots themselves tend to remember something entirely different.

They remember the people.

They remember the friendships.

They remember the squadron.

“There’s a camaraderie and a culture,” Reeman told me. “Definitely on the military side and even a little bit on the airline side, where the expectation of your comrades is a little more clear. I think there’s really some fun parallels.”

Those parallels immediately resonated with me.

Although my readership largely consists of investigators, federal agents, prosecutors, intelligence professionals, and military leaders, I have increasingly found myself interviewing senior aviators because the leadership principles remain remarkably consistent. Whether leading detectives through a homicide investigation or leading pilots into hostile airspace, the fundamentals rarely change. Preparation. Communication. Accountability. Trust.

Reeman immediately understood the comparison.

Rather than describing afterburners, aerial maneuvering, or the thrill of supersonic flight, he began talking about organizational culture.

That surprised me.

Most civilians assume fighter pilots define themselves by the aircraft they fly.

James defined himself by the people he served beside.

Toward the end of his military career, he accepted an assignment unlike anything he had previously experienced. Instead of commanding a traditional fighter organization, he was selected to help build one of the Air National Guard earliest organizations supporting an offensive space mission as the newly established United States Space Force began taking shape.

The mission itself was groundbreaking.

The leadership challenge was even greater.

“I hired about 150 millennials,” he recalled with a laugh.

There was no criticism in his voice, only genuine appreciation for the people he had the privilege to lead.

Most possessed exceptional technical ability.

Keeping them, however, proved to be the real challenge.

The general who selected Reeman for the assignment explained the problem candidly. The organization was attracting extraordinarily intelligent people with highly marketable skills. Defense contractors and private aerospace companies aggressively recruited them, often offering salaries that the military simply could not match.

Technology alone would not persuade them to stay.

Culture might.

The assignment, therefore, had little to do with satellites or orbital operations.

It had everything to do with leadership.

Reeman smiled as he remembered why his commander believed he was the right person for the job.

“I was not God’s gift to the F-16 by any stretch of the imagination,” he admitted with characteristic humility. “I’d put myself somewhere around average as a fighter pilot, but I had above-average people skills, and I loved the culture and camaraderie.”

That is not the answer one expects from someone whose résumé includes combat deployments, command experience, and decades of military aviation.

Many accomplished leaders spend considerable energy building their legend.

James Reeman seemed far more interested in dismantling his own.

Again and again throughout our conversation, he redirected credit toward the people who had shaped him. Mentors. Squadron commanders. Enlisted Airmen. Fellow pilots. Friends. Even while discussing one of the most significant leadership assignments of his career, he framed it not as a professional achievement but as an opportunity to preserve something he believed could easily be lost.

His commanding general understood that fighter squadrons possessed something no amount of funding could purchase.

As impressive as the aircraft were, people stayed because of the people.

That became Reeman’s mission.

“Part of my challenge was to go build camaraderie, build culture, and teach esprit de corps.”

Listening to him describe those years, I was struck by how rarely he talked about space technology itself.

Instead, he talked about belonging.

About shared identity.

About giving people reasons to remain part of something larger than themselves.

Fighter squadrons inherit traditions developed over generations. Stories are passed from one class of pilots to the next. Customs become culture.

A newly formed space organization begins without those advantages.

Reeman understood that organizations are rarely held together by mission statements.

They are held together by people who believe they belong.

That lesson would become even more apparent as our conversation turned toward the journey that brought him there, one that began decades earlier with a young college student standing beside a Vietnam fighter pilot, looking out a window at a row of gray F-16s.

The older pilot pointed toward the flight line.

“You know what color that is?” he asked.

The answer would become one of the defining lessons of James Reeman’s life.

Every military pilot can identify a moment that changed the way they viewed aviation.

For James Reeman, it did not happen in the cockpit of an F-16.

It happened years earlier, while standing beside a window at an Air National Guard fighter squadron in San Antonio, Texas.

It was 1992.

Reeman was a college student competing for what many aspiring military aviators consider the opportunity of a lifetime: a coveted F-16 pilot slot. Unlike many applicants, he had not graduated from a service academy. He described himself simply as a young man who loved flying, had accumulated flight hours while attending college, and hoped someone would give him a chance.

“I thought the interview went pretty well,” he recalled.

The conversation had covered his grades, athletics, flying experience, and even his upbringing on a Colorado farm. It felt relaxed. Encouraging.

Then, just as the interview was ending, one of the senior officers asked him to follow.

The officer was a Vietnam veteran who had flown the F-4 Phantom.

Rather than continuing the discussion in the conference room, the veteran walked Reeman to a large window overlooking the flight line, where several gray F-16s sat waiting in the Texas sun.

He pointed toward one of them.

“Do you know what color that airplane is?”

“Gray,” Reeman answered.

The veteran smiled.

“No,” he said. “That’s Air Superiority Gray.”

Then he explained why.

“It’s painted that color so our enemies don’t see us.”

There was a long pause.

The older pilot never took his eyes off the aircraft.

“I know what you want to do,” he finally said. “You want to paint that jet red, white, and blue. You want to fly it in air shows and impress everybody.”

Another pause.

“That airplane was built to kill people.”

Reeman remembers exactly what came next.

“I don’t think you have any killer in you.”

For a young man pursuing his dream assignment, the words landed like a punch.

Years of preparation suddenly seemed meaningless.

The veteran was not questioning his intelligence.

He was not questioning his flying ability.

He was questioning something much deeper.

Could he truly comprehend the gravity of what fighter aviation ultimately demanded?

Looking back more than thirty years later, Reeman no longer hears criticism in that conversation.

He hears responsibility.

“At the time, I thought he was telling me I wasn’t good enough,” he reflected. “Now I realize he was making sure I understood what I was asking to do.”

There is an important distinction.

The Vietnam pilot was not searching for someone who enjoyed violence.

He was searching for someone mature enough never to enjoy it.

That lesson would not fully resonate until years later.

Against all expectations, Reeman earned the fighter slot.

He completed pilot training, mastered one of the world’s most demanding combat aircraft, and eventually found himself preparing for war.

In early 2003, he deployed in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Everything he had spent years training for had suddenly become real.

“We were excited,” he told me. “We’d trained our whole careers for this.”

That statement deserves context.

To many civilians, excitement and combat appear incompatible.

What Reeman described, however, was not enthusiasm for war.

It was confidence in preparation.

The generation that trained him had spent decades preparing for a conflict against the Soviet Union that never occurred. They had devoted entire careers to mastering tactics, discipline, and teamwork without ever knowing whether they would be called upon to use them.

“The heroes that raised me won the Cold War,” Reeman said. “They out-prepared the Russians.”

Preparation became their identity.

Every briefing mattered.

Every debrief mattered even more.

Mistakes were dissected with brutal honesty because they understood something fundamental.

It is far better to bruise an ego during training than lose a pilot in combat.

That culture followed Reeman into Iraq.

The professionalism he described bore little resemblance to the Hollywood stereotype of fighter pilots driven by swagger or bravado.

Instead, he described an organization obsessed with learning.

Obsessed with discipline.

Obsessed with getting better every single day.

Only after flying combat missions did the conversation in San Antonio finally make complete sense.

The Vietnam veteran had never questioned whether Reeman possessed courage.

He questioned whether he understood the weight of lethal force.

Those are entirely different questions.

Years after becoming an F-16 pilot, he found himself interviewing the next generation of aspiring military aviators.

Sometimes he repeated the very conversation that had once unsettled him.

Not to discourage applicants.

To force them to think.

“Top Gun has done a wonderful job recruiting fighter pilots,” he joked.

Then his expression became more serious.

“But not everyone should be one.”

It was one of the most honest observations of our interview.

Modern culture often celebrates confidence.

Military aviation rewards humility.

The best fighter pilots understand exactly what their aircraft is capable of.

More importantly, they understand the consequences of using it.

As I listened to James reflect on that conversation more than three decades later, I realized something unexpected.

The Vietnam veteran had never been teaching him about flying.

He had been teaching him about leadership.

Leadership begins by understanding responsibility before authority.

Before someone can be trusted with extraordinary power, they must first appreciate the consequences that accompany it.

That lesson would shape every chapter of James Reeman’s career, from flying combat missions over Iraq to commanding Airmen, mentoring young pilots, and eventually helping build the culture of an entirely new military organization.

It is also why, decades after that unforgettable conversation in San Antonio, he now spends so much of his time mentoring the next generation through FastJetFriday and @f16pilot. His goal is not simply to help young people become better aviators. It is to help them understand the responsibility that comes with wearing the uniform long before they ever climb into the cockpit.

Follow this link for FASTJetFRIDAY ----->

https://fastjetfriday.com/

And to Lt. Col Reemans Instagram -----> https://www.instagram.com/f16pilot/

If the first lessons of James Reeman’s career centered on responsibility, the next chapter centered on leadership.

For many military officers, promotion means becoming responsible for larger organizations. For fighter pilots, that transition can be especially challenging. The very qualities that make someone exceptional in the cockpit do not always translate into leading large, diverse teams.

Reeman is remarkably candid about that reality.

“Fighter pilots, for the most part, are terrible leaders,” he told me with a grin.

It is an intentionally provocative statement, but one he quickly explained.

Fighter squadrons are built around extraordinary uniformity. Pilots attend similar schools, complete nearly identical training pipelines, and learn to solve problems in remarkably consistent ways. That consistency is not an accident.

It is a combat requirement.

When aircraft are traveling hundreds of miles per hour in hostile airspace, there is little time for lengthy debate or competing philosophies. Wingmen must anticipate one another’s decisions almost instinctively. Trust is built through repetition, standardization, and shared expectations.

That environment produces remarkable combat performance.

It can also create blind spots.

“Everybody thinks alike,” Reeman explained. “That’s fantastic in combat. But once you start leading outside of that environment, you realize not everybody processes information the same way.”

That realization became impossible to ignore when he accepted one of the most unusual assignments of his career.

Rather than commanding another traditional fighter organization, Reeman was selected to lead an Air National Guard unit supporting one of the nation’s earliest offensive space missions as the United States Space Force began taking shape.

The assignment was unlike anything he had experienced.

Instead of pilots, many of the people entering the organization were engineers, computer scientists, cyber specialists, and technical experts whose professional backgrounds looked very different from the fighter community.

Their greatest strength was also their greatest challenge.

“They were incredibly smart,” he said.

They questioned assumptions.

They challenged ideas.

They approached problems from completely different perspectives.

At first, the differences caught him off guard.

Then he realized those differences were exactly what the organization needed.

“There was tremendous diversity of thought,” he recalled.

That phrase stayed with me.

Public discussions about diversity often become narrowly focused on demographics.

Reeman was talking about something else entirely.

He was talking about diversity in the way people think.

Engineers approached problems differently than fighter pilots.

Cyber operators viewed risk differently than aviators.

Analysts often saw possibilities that operators overlooked.

Rather than trying to make everyone think alike, Reeman discovered the value of creating an environment where different perspectives could challenge one another before decisions were made.

“The creativity was unbelievable,” he said.

Innovation flourished.

Ideas moved quickly.

People challenged one another respectfully.

The organization became stronger because disagreement was encouraged.

Then the mission changed.

As the unit transitioned from building capability to executing operational missions, Reeman noticed something equally important.

The environment that fueled innovation was no longer sufficient.

“Once it became operational,” he explained, “there couldn’t be five different opinions about what to do.”

The organization had entered a different phase.

Combat demands clarity.

Once a decision is made, execution replaces discussion.

That balance between open debate and disciplined action became one of the most important leadership lessons of his career.

“You have to know when you’re brainstorming,” he said, “and you have to know when it’s time to execute.”

Listening to him describe that transition, I found myself thinking about the leaders I have interviewed throughout law enforcement and intelligence.

The same principle appears repeatedly.

The best investigators welcome competing theories during an investigation.

The best tactical commanders encourage input during planning.

But once the operation begins, everyone moves together.

Leadership is knowing the difference.

Reeman never suggested one approach was superior to the other.

Both were essential.

Innovation requires disagreement.

Execution requires unity.

The challenge is recognizing when to transition between them.

That philosophy became especially important as America entered a new era of military competition.

Space was no longer simply a support function.

It had become an operational domain.

The creation of the Space Force represented far more than a bureaucratic reorganization.

It reflected a fundamental shift in how military leaders viewed the future of warfare.

Reeman had a front-row seat.

He watched as commercial companies accelerated innovation at a pace the government often struggled to match.

He watched exceptionally talented young professionals leave military service for opportunities in private industry.

Rather than criticizing that reality, he accepted it.

The challenge was not preventing people from leaving.

The challenge was making their time in uniform meaningful enough that they carried those values with them wherever they went.

That perspective explains why Reeman speaks so passionately about mentorship today.

His mission is no longer limited to building military organizations.

It is helping young people become leaders regardless of where their careers ultimately take them.

Whether they remain in uniform, fly for an airline, join a technology company, or launch their own business, he hopes they leave with something more valuable than technical proficiency.

He hopes they leave understanding the importance of character.

That philosophy now defines everything he does through FastJetFriday.

The airplanes still capture people’s attention.

The leadership lessons are what keep them coming back.

To most people, the worlds James Reeman inhabited seem impossible to reconcile.

One day he might be climbing into the cockpit of an F-16 Fighting Falcon, reviewing target data, weapons configurations, fuel calculations, and threat assessments before launching into military airspace.

Days later, he would be walking through an airport terminal in a navy-blue airline uniform, greeting a first officer, welcoming passengers aboard a commercial airliner, and preparing to transport hundreds of people safely across the country.

One aircraft was designed for combat.

The other was designed to connect families, businesses, and communities.

The missions could not appear more different.

Reeman disagrees.

“People ask me all the time what it’s like going back and forth,” he said. “I actually think there are more similarities than differences.”

That answer surprised me.

Most people assume the greatest challenge is learning two completely different airplanes.

For Reeman, the airplane was never the difficult part.

The difficult part was leading people.

Throughout his career he moved seamlessly between military aviation and the airline industry, often flying one aircraft only days after flying the other. Rather than compartmentalizing the experiences, he found that each made him better at the other.

Military aviation sharpened discipline.

The airlines reinforced communication.

Both demanded professionalism.

“Preparation is preparation,” he explained. “The briefings matter. The execution matters. The debrief matters.”

Those three ideas surfaced repeatedly throughout our interview.

Brief.

Execute.

Learn.

Repeat.

The formula remained constant whether the mission involved combat operations or transporting passengers safely through bad weather.

Leadership followed exactly the same pattern.

One of the most fascinating moments in our conversation came when we discussed working alongside federal air marshals and local law enforcement.

Because The Human Intelligence Ledger focuses heavily on investigative leadership, I was curious how an airline captain approaches those relationships.

Reeman’s answer immediately returned to communication.

“If I had an air marshal onboard,” he said, “I always wanted to meet them before the flight.”

Not because he expected something to go wrong.

Because relationships are easier to build before a crisis begins.

If an unruly passenger created a problem at 35,000 feet, introductions would already be out of the way.

Trust had already begun.

The same philosophy extended to local police officers meeting an aircraft after landing.

“I always tried to give them a quick briefing,” he explained.

Rather than simply reporting that there was a disruptive passenger, Reeman believed leaders should provide context.

“Here’s the situation. Here’s what we’ve seen. Here’s what we’re hoping to accomplish. What do you think?”

It was not about controlling the outcome.

It was about ensuring everyone began with the same understanding.

Listening to him describe those interactions reminded me of something I have heard repeatedly from experienced investigators.

Good operations rarely begin with action.

They begin with communication.

Whether serving a search warrant, executing a high-risk arrest, or responding to a disturbance aboard an aircraft, success often depends on the quality of the briefing before anyone takes the first step.

That mindset also shaped Reeman’s role as a captain.

He never viewed command as simply occupying the left seat.

He viewed it as creating an environment where everyone could perform at their highest level.

That perspective eventually led him to become a line check airman, evaluating and mentoring other airline pilots.

Many people imagine evaluations as stressful events designed to identify mistakes.

Reeman described something different.

He viewed them as opportunities to coach.

To encourage.

To develop.

Throughout our interview, one theme emerged again and again.

His instinct was never to ask, “How do I judge this person?”

His instinct was to ask, “How do I help this person succeed?”

That philosophy explains why so many portions of our conversation eventually drifted away from airplanes altogether.

The machines fascinated him.

People inspired him.

At one point I asked what it actually felt like to transition between flying a high-performance fighter and a commercial airliner.

His answer was one of the most memorable analogies of the afternoon.

“Are you a hockey fan?” he asked.

I admitted only casually.

He laughed.

“Think about a professional hockey player,” he said. “When they’re in the middle of a game, they aren’t thinking about skating anymore.”

Years of repetition had made skating automatic.

The player’s attention shifts entirely toward strategy, teammates, positioning, and anticipation.

“Flying is the same way for a fighter pilot.”

Once the mechanics become instinctive, attention moves elsewhere.

Instead of concentrating on manipulating the aircraft, the pilot is processing enormous amounts of information simultaneously.

Targets.

Threats.

Wingmen.

Fuel.

Weather.

Weapons.

Communications.

Everything except the simple act of flying.

“You’re operating a complete weapon system,” he explained.

Commercial aviation demands a different rhythm.

The airplane itself occupies more of the pilot’s attention because the mission is different.

Yet the underlying principles remain remarkably similar.

Preparation.

Discipline.

Communication.

Trust.

Those words seemed to follow James Reeman everywhere he had served.

Whether discussing fighter squadrons, airline crews, or Space Force organizations, he consistently returned to the same conclusion.

Technology matters.

Training matters.

But people matter more.

That realization ultimately changed the direction of his life.

As retirement approached, Reeman found himself asking a question many career military officers eventually confront.

What comes next?

The answer, for him, had very little to do with airplanes.

It had everything to do with giving something back.

That decision would eventually become FastJetFriday, a mentoring community that has helped thousands of aspiring aviators pursue careers in military and civilian aviation. It also explains why, after more than three decades of extraordinary flying, James Reeman now seems most energized not by talking about his own accomplishments, but by helping others begin their own journey.

For many people, retirement marks the end of a career.

For James Reeman, it marked the beginning of a different kind of service.

After more than three decades in uniform and a successful career as an airline captain, he found himself asking a question that confronts many leaders who have spent their lives in service to others.

“What do I do now?”

The answer came naturally.

Help the next generation.

“These careers have given me far more than I could ever repay,” he told me. “This is simply my way of trying to give some of that back.”

That philosophy became FastJetFriday, a free weekly newsletter dedicated to aspiring military and civilian aviators. Each edition combines aviation stories, leadership lessons, practical career advice, and resources designed to help young pilots navigate professions that often appear intimidating from the outside.

For Reeman, however, the newsletter is only part of the mission.

He also spends countless hours answering emails, mentoring students, speaking with prospective pilots, and sharing his experiences through his social media platform, @f16pilot, where thousands follow his journey.

Listening to him describe this stage of his life, it became obvious that mentoring is not something he does.

It is who he has become.

That mindset reflects something I noticed throughout our entire conversation.

Whenever I asked about one of his accomplishments, he answered by talking about someone else.

A mentor.

A squadron commander.

A fellow pilot.

A young aviator.

His daughter.

The spotlight rarely stayed on him for long.

That humility may explain why so many people continue seeking his advice long after his military career ended.

One story in particular captured that spirit.

Every so often, Reeman quietly gives away a free flight to a young aviation enthusiast.

There is no publicity campaign.

No elaborate marketing strategy.

Simply an opportunity for someone to experience aviation from the cockpit for the first time.

He smiled when describing those moments.

“Watching somebody experience that for the first time,” he said, “that’s pretty rewarding.”

His passion for preserving aviation’s legacy extends beyond mentorship.

Today, Reeman serves on the Board of Directors for the Wings Over the Rockies Air & Space Museum in Denver, where generations of Americans can see historic aircraft, learn about military aviation, and better understand the people who flew them.

Follow this link to the Wings Over the Rockies website ---> https://wingsmuseum.org/

Notice the pattern.

Even there, the airplanes are not the destination.

They are the gateway.

The real objective is inspiring people.

The conversation eventually turned to family.

Reeman grew up on a farm in northern Colorado, where hard work was never optional.

“We raised cattle,” he recalled. “We raised the crops to feed them. Looking back, that’s probably where I learned my work ethic.”

Nothing about his upbringing suggested he would someday fly one of the world’s premier fighter aircraft.

There were no famous military connections.

No aviation dynasty.

Just parents who believed in hard work, personal responsibility, and keeping your word.

Those lessons would prove just as valuable as anything he later learned in military flight training.

When I mentioned that my own daughter had recently turned two years old, the conversation immediately shifted.

His daughter is now an adult.

Like her father, she learned to fly at a remarkably young age, soloing an airplane at sixteen and earning her private pilot certificate at seventeen.

There was unmistakable pride in his voice as he described flying together.

Not because she followed in his footsteps.

Because they now shared something that had shaped so much of his own life.

One detail stood out.

When they fly together today, he often occupies the other seat.

“I’m basically the copilot now,” he laughed.

For someone who spent decades commanding aircraft and leading organizations, there was something deeply symbolic about that statement.

Leadership eventually becomes stewardship.

At some point, every leader has to trust someone else with the controls.

Perhaps that is the final responsibility of leadership.

Not simply accomplishing the mission yourself.

Preparing someone else to accomplish it after you’re gone.

As our interview drew to a close, I asked Reeman what he believed civilians most often misunderstand about military service.

His answer was thoughtful.

“Less than one percent of Americans serve.”

That reality, he believes, has created a growing disconnect between those who wear the uniform and the society they protect.

Many people see the equipment.

Few understand the commitment.

“Our oath isn’t to a person,” he said. “It isn’t to a political party. It’s to the Constitution.”

That distinction mattered to him.

Throughout our conversation, he carefully separated military service from politics.

Administrations change.

Policies evolve.

The oath remains.

It is a commitment to something larger than any single individual.

That perspective reminded me of something he had shared much earlier in our conversation.

The Vietnam fighter pilot in San Antonio never questioned whether James Reeman could fly an airplane.

He questioned whether he understood the responsibility that came with it.

More than thirty years later, after combat deployments, command, airline flying, Space Force, and mentoring countless young aviators, I think James finally answered that question.

Not through words.

Through the life he built.

Tomorrow’s fighter pilots will almost certainly fly aircraft more advanced than the F-16.

Future airline captains will command airplanes that have yet to be designed.

Space operators will defend capabilities unimaginable when James Reeman first climbed into a cockpit.

Technology will continue changing.

Leadership will not.

Preparation.

Humility.

Integrity.

Service.

Those principles have defined James Reeman’s career far more than any airplane ever could.

For all of the stories we shared about fighter jets, airline cockpits, combat, and space operations, I left our conversation with a completely different impression than I expected.

The F-16 may have introduced James Reeman to the world.

But people became his life’s work.

And through

https://fastjetfriday.com/

and https://www.instagram.com/f16pilot/ that work is far from over.

When Kyle Sandler died on June 22, 2026, the story of Federal Prison Tips did not end.

In many ways, it was only beginning.

For years, Federal Prison Tips marketed itself as a trusted resource for federal defendants and their families, promising guidance through one of the most frightening experiences imaginable: entering the federal prison system. Clients often paid thousands of dollars for consulting services, believing they were hiring professionals with specialized knowledge.

The business revolved around one man, Kyle Sandler.

Following his death, however, another name emerged as the public face of the company.

Meg Feather.

She may not have founded Federal Prison Tips, but in its final days she became the individual speaking on behalf of the organization, responding to customers, defending its decisions, and explaining why countless clients would never receive the money they had paid.

That raises an unavoidable question.

What responsibility does the last public representative of a collapsed business have to the customers left behind?

The Announcement That Ended Everything

Just days after Sandler’s death, Federal Prison Tips announced that the company was ceasing operations immediately.

The statement informed customers that there would be no refunds, no reimbursement of payments, and no remaining administrative staff capable of resolving financial disputes.

The announcement read, in part:

“There is no remaining administrative capacity or staff available to process refunds, charge disputes, or issue reimbursements for any prior sales or services.”

For customers who had already paid for services they would never receive, the message was devastating.

The announcement offered no accounting of where customer funds had gone.

No explanation of remaining assets.

No discussion of outstanding obligations.

No plan to compensate clients.

Instead, customers were encouraged to seek assistance from an entirely different prison consulting company.

The business simply ended.

The money, according to the statement, would not be returned.

Meg Feather Steps Forward

As customers flooded Facebook with questions, one individual repeatedly responded.

Meg Feather.

Posting under her own name, Feather explained that everyone involved with Federal Prison Tips had been independent contractors.

She wrote:

“Everything about money fell on the owner.”

She further advised customers that they would need to pursue remedies through their financial institutions.

Her explanation may accurately describe how the company operated internally.

It does not answer the questions many customers continue to ask.

If only one person controlled the finances, where did the money go?

Were business records preserved?

Were any assets left behind?

Did anyone besides Sandler have access to company accounts?

Who, if anyone, can provide documentation to customers attempting to recover their payments?

To date, those questions remain unanswered publicly.

A Business Built on Expertise

Federal Prison Tips did not simply market general consulting services.

Its credibility rested heavily on Kyle Sandler’s claimed experience and expertise.

One issue that has already drawn scrutiny concerns Sandler’s educational background.

For years, Sandler was widely represented online as possessing a Juris Doctor, a credential that naturally conveys legal training and professional expertise.

Yet the publicly released Florida death certificate lists his education as:

“Some college credit, but no degree.”

That discrepancy raises legitimate questions about how Sandler presented his qualifications throughout the life of the business.

Whether those representations influenced customers’ decisions to purchase services is a question deserving careful examination.

Responsibility Does Not Necessarily End With Death

No evidence currently establishes that Meg Feather committed fraud.

Nor is there public evidence demonstrating that she personally received customer funds or exercised control over company finances.

Those distinctions matter.

But responsibility can take many forms.

Feather remained publicly associated with the company during its final days.

She became the person explaining why refunds would not occur.

She became the person answering customers.

She became the face of Federal Prison Tips after Kyle Sandler could no longer speak for himself.

That role naturally invites scrutiny.

Customers deserve to know whether any business records remain.

Whether any financial records exist.

Whether any unpaid clients can be identified.

Whether any assets survived the company’s closure.

And whether anyone intends to help victims understand what happened.

Questions That Still Deserve Answers

This article is not an accusation.

It is an invitation for transparency.

Meg Feather is uniquely positioned to answer questions that only someone involved with Federal Prison Tips may be able to address.

Among them:

What was her official role?

Did she have access to company records?

Who controlled client payments?

How much money remained when Kyle Sandler died?

Were customers ever informed how much had been collected versus how much remained?

Were records turned over to an attorney, an estate representative, or law enforcement?

Has anyone attempted to contact former clients about their financial losses?

If Federal Prison Tips no longer exists, who, if anyone, accepts responsibility for ensuring those clients receive answers?

The Story Is Not About One Man

Kyle Sandler is gone.

His death certificate closed one chapter.

It did not close the questions surrounding Federal Prison Tips.

For many former clients, the issue is no longer whether Sandler misrepresented his credentials or made promises he could not keep.

The issue is accountability.

Businesses do not simply disappear because their owner dies.

Customers who entrusted a company with their money deserve more than a Facebook post announcing that there will be no refunds.

Until someone can explain what happened to those funds, Federal Prison Tips remains a story that is unfinished.

And as the last public voice speaking on behalf of the company, Meg Feather occupies a central place in that story, whether she welcomes the scrutiny or not.

There are few titles in American public life that command more immediate credibility than “Former Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Deputy Assistant Director.”

The words themselves evoke an image of discipline, objectivity, and an unwavering commitment to evidence. Americans reasonably expect that someone who spent decades inside the Federal Bureau of Investigation understands the difference between suspicion and proof, allegation and evidence, opinion and fact. Those expectations are not merely symbolic. They are earned through years of investigations conducted under rigorous legal and evidentiary standards.

That is precisely why the recent public commentary of former FBI Deputy Assistant Director Scott Nelson deserves careful examination.

Nelson has become an increasingly visible voice on LinkedIn, where he frequently comments on election integrity, presidential leadership, national security, media conduct, and the future of American law enforcement. His posts are written with certainty, conviction, and the confidence of someone who once occupied one of the most respected investigative institutions in the world. His résumé is impressive. A retired Marine Corps captain and former senior FBI executive, Nelson has every right to participate in the national conversation.

But credentials, however distinguished, do not relieve anyone of the obligation to substantiate extraordinary public claims.

After reviewing a substantial collection of Nelson’s recent writings, one question surfaced repeatedly.

Where is the evidence?

Throughout his posts, Nelson often references his FBI career to reinforce his conclusions. He reminds readers that he supervised election law investigations. He references federal criminal statutes. He invokes decades of investigative experience. His professional background undoubtedly gives him valuable insight into how criminal investigations are conducted.

It does not, however, transform personal conclusions into established facts.

One of Nelson’s most persistent themes is election fraud. In multiple posts, he argues that election law violations are “most likely intentional,” suggesting that administrative failures have evolved into deliberate criminal schemes designed to influence American elections. These are serious allegations that naturally command public attention, particularly when they come from someone who once supervised FBI investigations.

Yet readers searching for supporting evidence will find remarkably little beyond Nelson’s own confidence.

Which investigations support these conclusions?

How many prosecutions established coordinated, intentional fraud rather than isolated criminal conduct?

What publicly available evidence demonstrates that the alleged misconduct occurred on a scale capable of altering election outcomes?

What data supports the assertion that these incidents represent systemic failures rather than individual crimes?

Those questions remain largely unanswered.

That absence matters because the FBI’s credibility has never rested on the authority of its agents. It has rested on the evidence they produce. Inside the Bureau, investigators are expected to corroborate information, challenge assumptions, interview witnesses, test competing theories, and allow facts to dictate conclusions. Investigations are not considered successful because experienced investigators believe something is true. They are successful because evidence demonstrates that it is true.

The same standard should apply when former investigators address the American public.

Nelson’s commentary extends well beyond elections. In another series of posts, he contrasts Theodore Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, Donald Trump, and Barack Obama through the lens of leadership. Roosevelt is celebrated as the quintessential Rough Rider. Reagan is portrayed as the statesman who restored American strength and defeated communism. Donald Trump is described as another Rough Rider who secured the border, fought crime, stood fearlessly under attack, and led America with decisive strength.

Barack Obama, by contrast, is presented as the embodiment of national division, criticism of America, and failed leadership.

Every American has the constitutional right to hold and express political opinions, including former FBI executives. The issue is not Nelson’s right to express those views. The First Amendment protects that right unequivocally.

The issue is whether readers can distinguish between evidence-based analysis and political advocacy when both are presented under the authority of a former senior FBI official.

Titles carry weight.

So does public trust.

When a former Deputy Assistant Director speaks with certainty, many readers naturally assume those conclusions are grounded in the same investigative rigor that characterized his government service. That assumption deserves examination, particularly when sweeping conclusions are offered without corresponding documentation.

The pattern appears again in Nelson’s discussion of national security and the press. Responding to reporting concerning presidential security, Nelson cited provisions of federal law and suggested that journalists who disclosed certain information violated criminal statutes designed to protect national defense information.

The legal question is considerably more complicated than the posts suggest.

Federal criminal statutes do not establish guilt merely because someone cites them. Every prosecution requires proof of each statutory element, factual context, intent where required, constitutional analysis, prosecutorial discretion, and ultimately judicial review. Lawyers, judges, and juries—not social media posts—determine whether criminal laws have been violated.

Former FBI executives understand this process as well as anyone.

Yet Nelson’s commentary frequently presents legal conclusions with little acknowledgment of the complexity that accompanies criminal investigations.

His rhetorical style reinforces that certainty.

“It is that simple.”

“No way.”

“Dead voters are dead wrong.”

“So lock ‘em up.”

These are memorable political slogans. They are effective social media writing. They generate engagement and reinforce existing beliefs.

They are not investigative findings.

One of the defining characteristics of professional investigators is intellectual restraint. They recognize that early assumptions can prove wrong, witnesses can be mistaken, evidence can contradict intuition, and complex cases rarely fit neatly into ideological narratives. Investigators are trained to follow evidence even when it leads to uncomfortable conclusions.

Social media rewards different instincts.

Confidence outperforms caution.

Certainty spreads faster than nuance.

Complexity loses to simplicity.

Perhaps that explains why so many former public officials eventually become commentators rather than investigators. The incentives change. Attention becomes more valuable than deliberation, and certainty generates more engagement than careful qualification.

But credibility should never become a substitute for evidence.

None of this diminishes Scott Nelson’s years of service to his country. His career in the Marine Corps and the FBI reflects decades of public service that deserve recognition and respect. Those accomplishments are real, and they matter.

They also impose a continuing responsibility.

Former leaders of institutions built upon evidence should remain committed to the evidentiary standards that made those institutions credible in the first place. When sweeping allegations are presented to millions of Americans, the public deserves more than confidence. It deserves documentation. It deserves transparency. It deserves the opportunity to evaluate the evidence independently.

That is especially true when the speaker’s former office lends extraordinary credibility to every word.

Scott Nelson frequently asks Americans to trust his conclusions because of where he has been and what he has done.

That is not an unreasonable request.

But trust has never been the foundation of the FBI’s investigative process.

Evidence is.

And regardless of rank, reputation, or résumé, evidence remains the only currency that should matter when extraordinary claims are presented to the American public.

Every generation of law enforcement encounters a drug that changes the landscape.

Sometimes it arrives hidden inside tractor-trailers crossing the southern border. Sometimes it appears inside correctional institutions disguised as legal mail. Other times it quietly finds its way onto the shelves of neighborhood smoke shops, sold in brightly colored packaging beside vape products and energy drinks, creating the impression that because it is sold legally, it must also be safe.

History has shown us that perception can be deadly.

Investigators watched synthetic cannabinoids spread through prisons before many agencies understood what they were dealing with. Fentanyl transformed from a little-known synthetic opioid into the deadliest drug crisis in American history. Xylazine quietly entered the illicit drug supply before most patrol officers had ever heard its name.

Today, another substance is beginning to command the attention of investigators, forensic toxicologists, emergency physicians, prosecutors, and the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Its name is 7-hydroxymitragynine, commonly marketed as 7-OH.

Federal authorities have announced plans to temporarily place highly concentrated and synthetic 7-OH products into Schedule I, warning that they present an imminent hazard to public safety. While often marketed alongside kratom, these enhanced products possess significantly stronger opioid-like effects than many consumers realize.

For one mother in Ames, Iowa, the government’s response arrives after the unthinkable had already happened.

When I first spoke with Molly Wauson, she never once asked me about politics.

She never asked about the Drug Enforcement Administration.

She never asked about legislation.

Instead, she wanted to talk about her son.

Not how he died.

How he lived.

“I don’t want people to just think of him as somebody who overdosed,” she told me. “I want people to know who he was.”

That sentence immediately changed the direction of our conversation.

After interviewing hundreds of law enforcement officers, intelligence professionals, correctional officials, prosecutors, and victims over the years, I have come to appreciate that official reports often tell us everything about an incident while revealing almost nothing about the person at the center of it.

Police reports document evidence.

Medical examiners determine the cause of death.

Toxicology reports identify chemical compounds.

None of those documents tell us who someone was before tragedy found them.

Molly wanted to begin there.

She raised Edric largely on her own.

His father struggled with methamphetamine and cocaine addiction during much of Edric’s childhood. Although his father would later become sober and rebuild his life, Molly carried much of the responsibility for raising their son.

“I was a single mom,” she told me. “His dad saw him every other weekend, but I raised him.”

She smiled as she began remembering his childhood.

“He had ADHD. He wasn’t violent or anything. He just couldn’t sit still. He was always running around.”

Like many energetic boys, Edric found it difficult to fit neatly into a traditional classroom.

He received special educational services through an Individualized Education Program while he was younger, not because he lacked intelligence, but because his mind simply worked differently.

“He was smart,” Molly said. “He just couldn’t stay in his seat.”

Outside of school, however, he thrived.

He played football.

He played basketball.

He swam.

For a time, he even learned to ice skate.

Listening to Molly describe those years, it became impossible to picture the person many people automatically imagine when they hear the phrase “overdose victim.”

She wasn’t describing a stereotype.

She was describing her little boy.

As he grew older, school became more difficult.

Eventually, Edric dropped out before graduating.

For many families, that moment becomes the defining chapter of a young person’s story.

Not for Molly.

“He got his GED last summer,” she said proudly.

There was no hesitation in her voice.

Only pride.

For her, earning that diploma wasn’t simply checking a box.

It represented resilience.

It represented refusing to quit.

It represented a young man trying to keep moving forward.

Throughout our conversation, one theme surfaced again and again.

Work.

“He always had a job,” Molly said.

By the age of seventeen, Edric was laying underground pipe, performing physically demanding labor that many adults would struggle to endure.

“He was making more money than I was,” she laughed.

Molly has a college education.

Her son built his career with his hands.

Construction crews don’t ask much about diplomas.

They care whether someone shows up.

Whether they work hard.

Whether they can be trusted.

According to Molly, Edric could.

“He was always a hard worker.”

There was no embellishment.

No attempt to portray him as perfect.

Just an honest assessment from someone who had watched him grow into adulthood.

If there was one role that transformed Edric more than any other, it was becoming a father.

He had two young children.

As Molly spoke about them, her voice softened.

“He took fatherhood very seriously.”

She paused before continuing.

“His dad wasn’t there the way he wanted him to be, and he always wanted to make sure his own kids never felt that way.”

Those words reveal something often missing from conversations about addiction.

People who struggle with substance use still love.

They still dream.

They still plan for tomorrow.

They still want to become better parents than the ones they had.

Edric wasn’t simply trying to survive.

He was trying to build a future.

He wanted his children to know they could depend on him.

He wanted them to grow up with a father who was present.

“His kids meant everything to him,” Molly said quietly.

Molly never attempted to hide the difficult parts of her son’s life.

“He struggled with addiction,” she told me matter-of-factly.

There was no denial.

No attempt to rewrite history.

Instead, she wanted readers—particularly those in law enforcement—to understand something she believes is often forgotten.

“He was responsible too.”

That sentence deserves careful consideration.

One of the greatest mistakes society makes is assuming that addiction erases every other part of a person’s identity.

It does not.

People struggling with addiction continue raising children.

They continue going to work.

They continue paying bills.

They continue loving their families.

They continue trying to become better people.

Recognizing that complexity is essential for investigators, prosecutors, probation officers, and anyone else whose work places them in daily contact with people battling substance use disorders.

Reducing every overdose victim to the label of “addict” prevents us from understanding the full scope of the crisis.

Edric’s story reminds us that human beings rarely fit neatly into simple categories.

Not long before his death, Edric accepted a new job at a warehouse.

According to Molly, he quickly distinguished himself.

“He became a lead receiver.”

She was proud of him.

He was proud of himself.

Like millions of blue-collar workers across America, the job required constant lifting, bending, and physical labor.

Eventually, he injured his neck.

It wasn’t a catastrophic injury.

It was the kind of injury construction workers, warehouse employees, mechanics, and laborers experience every day.

Rather than report it immediately, he tried to work through the pain.

Then he mentioned something to his mother.

“He told me he wanted to get some kratom because his neck hurt.”

Her response was immediate.

“I told him, ‘Go to the doctor.’”

He resisted.

“He said, ‘They’re not going to do anything for me.’”

Looking back now, Molly remembers that conversation with heartbreaking clarity.

She urged him to seek medical treatment.

He believed he had found another solution.

Like many consumers, neither of them understood the difference between traditional botanical kratom and the highly concentrated products increasingly being marketed as 7-OH.

“You hear kratom and you think it’s kind of benign,” she told me. “You don’t think it’s something that’s going to kill your kid.”

According to Molly, Edric purchased the product from Smoke Stop, located at 516 Lincoln Way in Ames, Iowa.

He left the store.

He returned home.

Hours later, he was dead.

His death certificate, according to Molly, identifies 7-hydroxymitragynine as the cause of the fatal overdose.

As our conversation came to a pause, Molly reflected on what still haunts her the most.

“You think you’re going to a store. It’s professionally packaged. You think it’s safe.”

For her, those words are no longer an observation.

They are a warning.

And they are the beginning of a story that every law enforcement officer, investigator, policymaker, and parent should hear before another family experiences the same unimaginable loss.

There are moments in life that permanently divide time into two chapters.

Before.

And after.

For Molly Wausen, that moment began with something that, at first, didn’t seem extraordinary.

Her son wasn’t answering his phone.

Parents know their children’s routines. Even after they become adults, there is a rhythm to communication that develops over years. A missed call doesn’t necessarily create panic, but it creates questions.

As the hours passed, those questions became concern.

Molly decided to drive to Edric’s apartment.

Her three-year-old grandson was with her.

She remembers every detail.

“He wasn’t answering his phone,” she recalled. “So I just drove over there.”

When she arrived, the door was unlocked.

She walked inside.

What she saw will remain with her for the rest of her life.

“I found my son dead on the couch.”

Her voice never wavered when she told me.

There was no theatrical emotion.

No anger.

Only the quiet exhaustion that comes from reliving the worst day of your life over and over again.

“There was foam coming out of his mouth.”

She immediately knew something was terribly wrong.

Years may pass, but parents never forget the first seconds after finding their child.

“I could tell he was already gone.”

She noticed the changes in his skin.

She understood before anyone said a word.

Before paramedics.

Before police.

Before the medical examiner.

She knew.

Her thoughts immediately shifted to the little boy standing beside her.

“I wanted to get my grandson out of there.”

No grandmother should have to make that decision.

No three-year-old should unknowingly walk into the room where his father has died.

Molly screamed for help.

A young man from a neighboring apartment came running.

The fire station was only a short distance away, and emergency responders arrived within minutes.

She remembers watching their faces.

Without anyone speaking, she could read the expressions.

“I knew.”

As investigators began processing the scene, Molly found herself searching for answers.

She had one thought that continued returning to her mind.

Kratom.

Months earlier, Edric had mentioned using what he believed was kratom after hurting his neck at work.

That conversation suddenly felt different.

“I told them, ‘Check for kratom.’”

At that moment, she wasn’t thinking about synthetic alkaloids or emerging drug trends.

She was thinking about the last conversation she had with her son.

“He had told me he was taking it because his neck hurt.”

The investigation continued.

The autopsy was completed.

Eventually, the answers arrived.

According to Molly, the medical examiner determined that Edric had died from 7-hydroxymitragynine, commonly known as 7-OH.

It wasn’t traditional botanical kratom.

It was a highly concentrated product that federal authorities are now moving to prohibit.

“When I finally saw the death certificate, I couldn’t believe it,” Molly told me.

“I had to keep looking at it because I didn’t even know what it said.”

She later researched the substance herself.

What she discovered only deepened her disbelief.

“Everything you read about kratom makes it sound pretty benign.”

“Then you start reading about 7-OH, and it’s a completely different story.”

Like many grieving parents, Molly began retracing every step.

Where had he bought it?

Who sold it?

How could something capable of killing her son be available over the counter?

She believes he walked into the store, purchased the product legally, went home, used it, and died later that same day.

“You think the dangerous drugs come from drug dealers.”

She paused.

“You don’t think they’re coming from a store.”

That observation stayed with me.

For decades, public safety campaigns have warned Americans about buying drugs on street corners or from anonymous dealers.

Very few parents are warning their children about products sold inside brightly lit retail businesses.

Following my interview with Molly, I decided to contact Smoke Stop myself.

A manager answered the telephone.

I introduced myself and asked a simple question.

“Do you sell 7-OH?”

“Yeah, we do.”

I asked how the products were sold.

“Depends on which one you’re getting,” he replied. “We have singles. We have packs. Anywhere from twenty milligrams up to one hundred milligrams.”

The conversation remained professional.

I then asked whether he was aware that, according to the family, a twenty-two-year-old customer had purchased 7-OH from the store before returning home and dying later that same day.

There was a pause.

“No, I did not.”

I explained that I was preparing an article for The Human Intelligence Ledger and wanted to provide the business an opportunity to comment.

Again, the manager remained courteous.

“I’m not going to make any statement. That’s more my boss’s thing.”

I asked whether the owner was available.

He wasn’t.

I then asked a broader question.

If products being sold in the community were contributing to fatal overdoses, did he have any comment?

“I didn’t know it was killing people in my community.”

“I’m not the owner, so I don’t decide what we sell.”

Those statements deserve to be included exactly as they were made.

The manager acknowledged that the store sells 7-OH products.

He confirmed they are available in concentrations ranging from twenty to one hundred milligrams.

He stated that he was unaware of Edric’s death and declined to speak on behalf of the owner.

Whether the business bears any legal responsibility is a question that belongs to investigators and, if litigation is pursued, the courts. This article does not reach legal conclusions. It simply presents the facts gathered during my reporting.

As Molly continued speaking, one theme emerged again and again.

Confusion.

“You think because it’s packaged professionally that somebody has tested it.”

“You think because it’s sold in a store, it’s safe.”

“You don’t think your kid is going to die.”

She told me she later learned that some researchers have found significant inconsistencies in the concentration of certain enhanced 7-OH products, raising additional concerns about what consumers may actually be purchasing.

Whether every product contains the amount listed on its label remains a question for regulators and laboratory testing.

For Molly, however, those scientific questions are secondary.

The outcome is already irreversible.

Her son is gone.

Near the end of our conversation, I asked Molly what she hopes comes from telling her story publicly.

She didn’t hesitate.

“I want to dedicate my life to fighting this.”

She isn’t seeking sympathy.

She isn’t looking for attention.

She wants parents to understand that the next emerging drug threat may not come from a cartel operative or a street dealer.

It may come from a product sitting behind the counter of a neighborhood smoke shop, purchased by someone who genuinely believes they are buying something relatively harmless.

“If I can stop another family from going through this,” she said quietly, “then at least something good came out of losing my son.”

As our interview ended, I couldn’t help but think about the growing number of law enforcement officers, toxicologists, medical examiners, prosecutors, and policymakers who are only now beginning to recognize the significance of 7-OH.

For Molly Wausen, that recognition comes too late.

For the rest of the country, there is still time to listen.

When most Americans think about dangerous narcotics, they picture cartel trafficking routes, clandestine laboratories, or street dealers conducting hand-to-hand transactions in dark parking lots.

For decades, public awareness campaigns have reinforced that image.

The assumption has been simple: if a substance is dangerous enough to kill, it probably exists somewhere outside the legitimate marketplace.

That assumption no longer reflects reality.

Today, many of the products generating concern among investigators are sold openly, displayed in brightly lit retail stores alongside nicotine products, flavored beverages, and vaping supplies. To the average customer, there is little that distinguishes them from countless other products lining the shelves.

That familiarity creates something investigators understand well.

A false sense of security.

Molly Wausen described that misconception better than any scientific paper could.

“You think you’re going to a store,” she told me. “It’s professionally packaged. You think it’s safe.”

Those words have remained with me throughout this investigation because they capture the central challenge facing law enforcement.

Perception often shapes behavior more powerfully than chemistry.

People naturally assume that products sold openly in a retail environment have been thoroughly evaluated, consistently manufactured, and determined to present an acceptable level of risk. Whether that assumption is justified depends upon the product itself and the regulatory framework surrounding it.

That is precisely why the debate surrounding enhanced and synthetic 7-OH products has become so significant.

During my interview, Molly explained that when her son first mentioned kratom, neither of them viewed it as something comparable to heroin or fentanyl.

“You hear ‘kratom,’ and you think it’s kind of benign,” she said. “You don’t think it’s something that’s going to kill your kid.”

That misunderstanding is not unique to one family.

Traditional kratom has been the subject of vigorous debate for years. Some individuals report using botanical kratom products for pain or as an aid in reducing opioid use, while others point to concerns about dependence and adverse effects. Those debates continue.

The products now drawing the DEA’s attention, however, are different.

Highly concentrated and synthetic 7-OH formulations are designed to deliver levels of 7-hydroxymitragynine far beyond what naturally occurs in kratom leaves. According to federal authorities, these enhanced products may produce substantially stronger opioid-like effects than consumers realize.

That distinction matters.

It also helps explain why investigators, forensic laboratories, and medical professionals are beginning to pay much closer attention.

Law enforcement has repeatedly experienced the same cycle.

A new substance enters the market.

Marketing outpaces education.

Availability expands faster than regulation.

Only after overdoses begin to increase do agencies fully recognize the scope of the problem.

Synthetic cannabinoids followed that pattern.

Designer fentanyl analogues followed that pattern.

Nitazenes followed that pattern.

Each required investigators to learn an entirely new vocabulary while simultaneously trying to protect their communities.

The emergence of concentrated 7-OH products raises similar questions.

How widely are these products being used?

Who is manufacturing them?

How consistent are the concentrations from one package to another?

How many overdose deaths have gone unrecognized because investigators simply weren’t testing for them?

Those questions remain the subject of ongoing investigation, but they illustrate why intelligence gathering remains essential.

Emerging drug threats rarely announce themselves with a press conference.

More often, they reveal themselves through patterns.

A toxicologist notices an unfamiliar compound.

A detective encounters the same product at multiple overdose scenes.

A poison center begins receiving similar calls.

A patrol officer repeatedly recovers the same packaging during traffic stops.

Each observation may appear insignificant in isolation.

Together, they become intelligence.

During our conversation, Molly mentioned another concern that deserves attention.

She had been reading reports suggesting that laboratory testing of certain enhanced 7-OH products had identified substantial differences between labeled concentrations and actual contents.

“People think they’re getting one thing,” she said. “How do they even know what they’re getting?”

Whether particular products contain the concentrations represented on their labels is a matter for scientific testing and regulatory enforcement. Nevertheless, her question reflects the uncertainty many consumers face when purchasing products that appear standardized but may vary considerably in formulation.

That uncertainty has important implications for investigators trying to understand overdose events.

Under the leadership of Administrator Terrance C. Cole The Drug Enforcement Administration‘s recent decision to pursue emergency scheduling of synthetic and highly concentrated 7-OH products represents far more than a bureaucratic action.

It reflects an assessment that these substances now pose a sufficiently serious threat to justify federal intervention.

For narcotics investigators, prosecutors, and intelligence analysts, that announcement should prompt additional questions rather than end the conversation.

How prevalent are these products locally?

Have officers received training to recognize them?

Are crime laboratories routinely testing for them?

Are probation officers, drug courts, and treatment providers encountering individuals who believe these products are “safe” because they remain available in retail stores?

Those questions are no longer theoretical.

They have become operational.

Toward the end of my interview, I asked Molly what she wanted readers—particularly those in law enforcement—to understand.

She didn’t hesitate.

“I want to dedicate my life to fighting this.”

There was no anger in her voice.

Only resolve.

She understands that sharing her son’s story will not change what happened.

It will not erase the image of walking into his apartment.

It will not silence the memories that accompany every parent who has buried a child.

But she hopes it might accomplish something else.

“If another family doesn’t have to go through this,” she told me, “then maybe something good can come from losing him.”

That is why this story matters.

Not because it offers easy answers.

It does not.

Not because it assigns blame.

That is for investigators and, where appropriate, the courts to determine.

It matters because intelligence often begins with listening.

Listening carefully to families.

Listening to investigators working overdose scenes.

Listening to toxicologists identifying unfamiliar compounds.

Listening to emergency physicians noticing changing patterns.

And listening to communities before isolated tragedies become national crises.

The Human Intelligence Ledger has always sought to understand how information becomes intelligence and how intelligence, when acted upon, can save lives.

Molly Wausen’s story is more than the story of one family.

It is an early warning.

Whether that warning prevents future tragedies will depend not only on the actions of federal regulators, but also on the willingness of investigators, policymakers, retailers, healthcare professionals, and communities to recognize emerging threats before they become the next chapter in America’s continuing overdose epidemic.

For Molly, that work has become deeply personal.

For the rest of us, it should become a matter of public safety.

There are some interviews you schedule months in advance.

Others seem to find you.

This was one of those.

Paul Holte has spent nearly two decades flying passengers safely around the world as a United Airlines captain. He commands the Boeing 757 and 767, two of the most iconic aircraft ever built, while quietly becoming one of the most respected aviation creators on YouTube through his channel, My Layover Life.

To hundreds of thousands of viewers, Paul is more than an airline captain. He is a storyteller who invites people behind the cockpit door and into a world few ever get to experience. His videos blend aviation, travel, leadership, family, and adventure with a refreshing authenticity that has earned him an extraordinarily loyal following.

I count myself among them.

For as long as I can remember, aviation has fascinated me.

As a kid growing up in Southern California, I spent countless hours at airports collecting airline timetables, watching departures through terminal windows, and memorizing aircraft types long before I could drive a car. Even today, I still find myself stopping whatever I’m doing to watch an airplane climb into the sky.

Some people grow up admiring movie stars.

Others idolize professional athletes.

I have always looked up to airline pilots and aviators.

There is something extraordinary about individuals who dedicate their lives to safely carrying hundreds of strangers through the air. The discipline. The precision. The professionalism. The quiet confidence. It has always fascinated me.

That is precisely why Paul’s work resonated with me from the very beginning.

His videos were never simply about airplanes or spectacular destinations. They offered something far more interesting. They showed the person behind the uniform.

They showed early morning departures, international layovers, family vacations, ordinary conversations, and the quiet moments between flights that passengers never see. Watching My Layover Life felt less like watching aviation videos and more like being invited into the life of someone who genuinely loves what he does.

Over the years, I came to admire his work tremendously.

Then something completely unexpected happened.

A Serendipitous Meeting at Denver International Airport

It was close to midnight inside Denver International Airport.

The evening rush had long since faded.

Most of the terminal had emptied, leaving only a handful of tired travelers from the final arriving flights of the night quietly making their way through the concourse. Paul and I had arrived on completely separate flights and were each walking in different directions.

Out of the tens of thousands of passengers who had moved through Denver that day, our paths crossed.

I looked up. There he was. Without even thinking, I called out across the terminal.

“Paul!”

He immediately turned around.

I got the sense that he knew exactly what was happening.

It was certainly not the first time someone had recognized him in an airport.

Paul is an exceptionally humble man, but he also understands that My Layover Life has built an incredibly loyal audience. Aviation enthusiasts tend to be exactly that. Enthusiasts. We remember tail numbers. We debate aircraft types. We track flights for fun. We spend hours watching airplanes simply because we love them.

Paul’s audience is filled with people like that. People like me. As I introduced myself, the conversation became effortless. There was no awkwardness. No pretending. No small talk.

Two aviation geeks had unexpectedly met in one of the busiest airports in the world.

Within minutes we were discussing airplanes, airports, flying, travel, Minnesota, Hawaii, YouTube, and life.

Looking back, I cannot imagine a more appropriate place for us to have met than Denver International Airport.

Sometimes the best interviews are not arranged months in advance.

Sometimes they begin with two people crossing paths at exactly the right place and exactly the right time.

It was an encounter I will never forget.

The Weight of the Left Seat